Diango Hernández
Instopia

Galerie Barbara Thumm presents Instopia, Diango Hernández’s sixth solo show at the gallery.

The opening of Instopia coincides with the launch of the standalone site of New Viewings, the new experimental platform for virtual art founded by Galerie Barbara Thumm in March 2020. Conceived as a utopian space for artistic expression, New Viewings has, in its first year showed over 70 artists in online exhibitions.
As a counterpart to Instopia, the show of physical works in the gallery, New Viewings will launch its standalone site with a presentation of digital works by Diango Hernández – a fitting collaboration as the concept of New Viewings was inspired by many discussions between Barbara Thumm and Diango Hernández.
The two concurrent exhibitions show how the digital expands the analogue realm of production and creates experimental artistic strategies that go beyond the mere question of whether the digital will replace the analogue.

Instopia is a radical and timely show for this moment of flux in which the boundary between the virtual and physical worlds is becoming increasingly porous. It is the first physical manifestation of Instopia, Hernández’s Instagram art project, begun in 2015. All of the works are, at least partly, articulated in Waves, an abstract visual language of wave-like forms devised by Hernández to graphically represent text. Typically he uses brief excerpts from Cuban revolutionary writing, a fact obscure to the viewer but symbolically important to the artist.

Nick Hackworth