Alejandro Piñeiro Bello
ECOS
April 11th – May 23rd, 2026

Opening Reception:
Saturday, April 11th, 2026, 5–9PM
KDR 790 NW 22nd Street, Miami, FL 33127

KDR is pleased to present ECOS, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Havana-born, Miami-based artist Alejandro Piñeiro Bello, his second with the gallery. 

At the heart of the word "Echo" is a phantom story: a sound that refuses to disappear, insists on returning, and finds in repetition not diminishment but accumulation. The exhibition arrives as something deepened, a body of work in which time does not pass so much as it layers, folds, and resurfaces.

The exhibition draws on Cuban anthropologist Antonio Benítez Rojo's vision of the Caribbean as a repeating island, a place that cycles through history not only in tragedy but in an almost cosmological rhythm. Piñeiro Bello moves through this sea of accumulated images like an oracle rather than an archivist, selecting and arranging rather than cataloguing and explaining. His paintings do not illustrate the Caribbean; they reverberate it. Iridescent greens, purples, turquoises, and mauves settle into natural linen. From that friction, color against weave and pigment against time, landscapes emerge that are at once remembered, imagined, and entirely unknown.

A flock of birds take flight from a paradisiacal landscape in Adiós a Cuba (Farewell to Cuba). A place so beautiful it seems condemned to be coveted, violated, and taken. The painting carries the weight of its title: a piano composition by Ignacio Cervantes, written in 1875 upon his forced exile from the island. Piñeiro Bello does not mourn Cuba. Instead, he meditates on its recurring cycles of ruin and splendor, an island so exquisitely itself that history has found it impossible to leave alone. The birds, elongated and spectral, carry the echoes of all who have had to abandon their homes. Among them, perhaps Wifredo Lam, who in his own paintings rendered himself as a tall, ethereal bird.

In Tres Lindas Cubanas (Three Beautiful Cubans), three feminine auras, beautiful beings, dissolve into the whole of their symbolism, into spirals that climb as clouds and water. Color takes up arms against the horizon, dividing sky from sea. Marks and forms evoke atomic suns, island silhouettes, and a young figure under a palm tree, whose eyes find yours. The painting reveals itself as its own fractal, looping, repeating, toward eternity.

Among the exhibition's largest works,  El Abrazo del Mar (The Embrace of the Sea), sparked by a passage from Alejo Carpentier's; “The Lost Steps” …the hours pass calmly, skirting the plateaus, moving from one channel to another, through small labyrinths of gentle waters that, suddenly, make us turn our backs to the sun, only to receive it head-on…Piñeiro Bello carries this into the painting with counterpointed brushwork descends, deconstructing dioxazine purples, passing through French ultramarine blue, sinking into turquoises, and finally releasing a haze of veiling whites that descend almost to the horizon in shades of pink, mauve, and royal blues. A pictorial argument that literature and painting are two dialects of the same language.

Dots, strokes, apparitions, clouds, spirals, birds that are beings, and humans inhabiting small fragments of the Caribbean's magical reality. In ECOS, mysticism and romance grow with color, form, and history, creating images that refuse to stay still. They seem to arrive from elsewhere, surface slowly into form, then reverberate outward like waves, like songs, like echoes.

Alejandro Piñeiro Bello was born in Havana, Cuba, in 1990. He graduated from the National Academy of Fine Arts, San Alejandro, La Habana, Cuba. He has participated in major public projects during the Havana Biennials in 2012, 2015, and 2019. His works have also been shown in exhibitions by KDR in Miami, FL, and by Pace Galleries in London, Hong Kong, and Seoul, Korea. His most recent group exhibitions include Black Earth Rising, Baltimore Museum of Art, MD; 50–90: The Tenth Anniversary of The Long Museum, The Long Museum, Shanghai. He was awarded grants from The Shelley and Donald Rubin Foundation, New York, and The Rockefeller Brothers Fund, New York, in collaboration with Pioneer Works, New York. He was a resident at the Vermont Studio Center in 2022, and in 2023, he was selected for the artist-in-residence program at the Rubell Museum. Recent exhibitions of his work include Future Past Perfect: Escaping Paradise, NSU Art Museum, Fort Lauderdale, Florida (2023); En El Arco Del Caribe, KDR, Miami, Florida (2023–2024), and Alejandro Piñeiro Bello, Rubell Museum, Miami, Florida (2023–2204). His work is held in important collections such as The Brownstone Foundation, Paris; Chrysler Museum Collection, Norfolk, Virginia; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami,FL; Marquez Art Projects, Miami, FL; Museum of Latin American Art, Long Beach, California, CA; NSU Art Museum, Fort Lauderdale, FL; Rubell Museum, Miami,FL; and The Shelley and Donald Rubin Foundation Collection, New York, NY. In addition, this year he will unveil a new commission at the Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum in Madrid, as part of the Blanca and Borja Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection program. He currently lives and works in Miami, Florida.