Alexandre Arrechea (b. 1970, Trinidad, Cuba) is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice examines how power operates through architecture, objects, and the organization of public space. He graduated from the Instituto Superior de Arte in Havana in 1994 and gained international recognition as a founding member of Los Carpinteros, the Cuban collective that brought conceptual experimentation into dialogue with craftsmanship and everyday material culture. In 2003, he left the group to establish an independent practice.
Working across sculpture, watercolor, installation, photography, and video, Arrechea investigates the forces that govern individual and collective experience: surveillance, ownership, exclusion, economic ambition, and historical memory. Architecture provides a vocabulary through which these forces become visible. Buildings bend, rotate, and assume unfamiliar functions, unsettling the authority conveyed by their original forms. His transformations expose the vulnerability of institutions that present themselves as permanent. Humor and contradiction are central to this approach, drawing viewers into situations where familiar objects cease to behave as expected.
His public project No Limits (2013) placed ten monumental reinterpretations of New York landmarks along Park Avenue, bringing questions about financial power, civic authority, and instability into the city’s daily circulation. Other major projects include Katrina Chairs (2016), presented at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, and Dreaming with Lions (2020), an installation at Faena Miami Beach that addressed endurance through references to Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea.
His practice was surveyed in Intersected Horizons at the Museum of Latin American Art, Long Beach, in 2023–2024. More recently, Act 1: Timelines at LnS Gallery, Miami, in 2025–2026 examined the development of his work alongside Milagros at the Temple of Abundance, his monumental mural commission for The Underline in Miami.