Augusto Esquivel

Augusto Esquivel (born 1976, Buenos Aires, Argentina) is a sculptor who lives and works in Miami. He is best known for suspended sculptures built from thousands of sewing and shank buttons strung on clear monofilament and hung from acrylic supports, with subjects that range from Old Master paintings to the objects of popular culture. In his own words he is "obsessed with comparisons of reality and potential and the balance between them, in art: the idea of chaos in perfect order: an object seemingly solid to the eye can also be fragile and inconsistent to the touch."

Born and raised in Buenos Aires, Esquivel was deeply marked by memories of his grandmother, a seamstress who kept her buttons in a tin can; her sewing box later became a defining inspiration for his practice. His first passion was science fiction film, which led him to study cinematography and audiovisual arts at CIEVYC (1997-1999) and special effects and artistic make-up at FX Primera Escuela Argentina de Efectos Especiales (1999-2001) in Buenos Aires, training that introduced him to sculpting. He moved to the United States in 2001 and took a metal sculpture workshop at the Art Center in Miami in 2005.

Each work begins with a digital photograph that Esquivel makes himself, enlarges until it pixelates and pins to the wall. Against it he strings the buttons one at a time, concentrating on the single unit rather than the whole while the ghosted image behind the scrim guides his color choices; when the piece is finished the photograph is destroyed. Critics have related this way of building a coherent image out of tiny units of color to Seurat and Chuck Close. Esquivel acknowledges his obsessive-compulsive nature and the urge to create order out of chaos, and the art historian Carol Damian likens each button in his work to an atom in a molecule, observing that suspension keeps the pieces moving with air and light and makes the viewer reconsider the button, "a circle, the perfect shape," for its formal and symbolic qualities.

His subjects include recreations of Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring, the Mona Lisa, a Van Gogh self-portrait and Marilyn Monroe; a white polar bear with her cub on her back, flattened like a skin rug; pianos; a gold toilet that riffs on Maurizio Cattelan; and a mop and mop bucket that reflect the protests staged by environmental activists in art museums to draw attention to the climate crisis. Denise Gerson, former associate director of the Lowe Art Museum at the University of Miami, writes that the work resists classification, marrying twenty-first-century technology with the material side of traditional art-making so that objects of traditional insignificance become "things of beauty and perhaps joys forever."

Since 2010 Esquivel's work has been shown at art fairs across the United States and in Bogotá, including Art Miami, Art Wynwood, Scope New York, ArtBo and Pinta Miami, and in exhibitions at the Lowe Art Museum, Bernice Steinbaum Gallery, Bakehouse Art Complex and the Hartvest Project at Pinecrest Gardens in Miami. As Kathy O'Flinn, managing editor of Spotlight News Magazine, put it, "Esquivel takes buttons beyond the mundane into new realms."