Karlo Andrei Ibarra

Arróniz presents Escala de valores (Scale of Values), an exhibition by Karlo Andrei Ibarra.

Karlo Andrei Ibarra is a visual artist who holds a Bachelor’s degree in Painting from the School of Plastic Arts and Design (EAPD) in San Juan, Puerto Rico. His practice addresses sociopolitical issues through poetic and literary means. His work affirms the symbolic power of objects, materials, and words, and develops the notion of repair as a form of historical reappropriation and cultural resistance.

Ibarra’s work investigates the consequences of the colonial regime from a contemporary perspective that engages with mass media and with the physical and symbolic borders of the global community. Drawing from the fertile field of associations between signifier and signified—while avoiding clichés—each of his works proposes a balanced and carefully constructed political reading that operates as a reflective accomplice to dominant paradigms.

His work functions as an allied mirror that, mediated through intense political conceptualization, reflects and questions various social biases. Ibarra has exhibited widely in countries and institutions around the world, including the Dominican Republic, Cuba, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, Panama, Costa Rica, Colombia, Chile, Peru, Brazil, Argentina, Spain, Romania, Sweden, the Netherlands, Russia, Canada, China, and Taiwan, as well as in U.S. cities such as San Francisco, New York, Chicago, Portland, Miami, Denver, Boston, Phoenix, and Washington, D.C., among others. On June 20, 2024, he presented the mid-career solo exhibition Concrete Wounds, organized by the Atlantic Center of Modern Art (CAAM) in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain.

— Arróniz