Thursday, September 18, 2025 | 5:00 – 8:00 PM
Location: Cuban Artists Fund Studio, 208 E 51st St, 2nd Floor, New York, NY (map)
Visits available by appointment from September 19 to 20 (email info@residencyunlimited.org)
“Blossom” brings together new works created by Lianet Martinez at the Cuban Artists Fund Studio during her residency in New York City.
The title of this open studio evokes the process of blossoming: an unfolding landscape of ideas, images, and meanings that open as a gesture of growth and affirmation. Featuring seven large-scale watercolors and a video of the sculptural installation ‘Captive’, these works emerge from an inquiry into the history of individuality, of womanhood, and of the artist — and, within this, the resilience of the spirit. They constitute a cartography of the body, inscribed in both physical and subjective memories, traversed by a social context that continually negotiates the tension between the individual and the collective.
Woven entirely by the artist from metallic handcuffs, “Captive” embodies a real hammock but is also a living contradiction. The hammock, traditionally associated with rest, cradling, and the trust of a body surrendered to its weave, here transforms into a bed of coldness and severity. The industrial perfection of the structure erases any trace of the artisanal or human, rendering it an impeccable object — calculated, seamless, without cracks. It is this very precision that makes it all the more forceful: the revelation that “rest” itself may be constructed out of chains. According to Lianet, “To lie down in it would be to be embraced by prison itself. And yet, the swaying of the hammock may still be read as maternal, a rocking that soothes. Then what is it? A caress made of control? Pleasure entangled with pain? A society that offers rest, but only at the cost of submission?”
In contrast, the seven watercolors on view propose a language in which objects cease to be what they are and instead become symbolic acts. In them, the everyday converges with the unexpected, producing images where the union of two distinct elements generates a third meaning — a metaphor for experience itself. They are not merely representations of objects, but gestures that fuse and transform, activating a field of tension: fragility and strength, protection and vulnerability, body and tool. Conceptually, these works may be read as an exercise in transfiguration, where objects become actions and actions become memories, proposing a space in which the personal expands into the universal.
Together, these works underscore that art not only crosses spaces and contexts but also exceeds the very boundaries of reality. Through installations and watercolors, Lianet transform the everyday into a visual, critical, and sensorial poetics that explores identity, experience, and perception in transit, revealing how these dimensions are inscribed within the body and in time — and how art can generate openness and reflection upon our environment and our lived realities.
These pieces will be included in Lianet’s first solo exhibition at Zapata Gallery in Miami, with “Liminal Space” that opens on October 11, 2025.
This program benefits from the support of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the Cuban Artists Fund.
