Enrique Castro-Cid

Enrique Castro-Cid was born in 1937 in Santiago de Chile. He studied at the Escuela de Bellas Artes, Universidad de Chile, from 1957 to 1959, where he later taught fine arts. In 1961 he received a grant from the Organization of American States that enabled him to move to New York. While developing his artistic practice, he taught at the Pratt Institute, the School of Visual Arts, and the Art Students League. During this period he also pursued independent studies in philosophy and mathematics. 

Castro-Cid developed an art practice that combined painting, collage, and sculpture with new technologies, often drawing on philosophy, mathematics, and science. His early work included vivid figurative painting and a series of kinetic constructions that incorporated engineered movement and viewer interaction. In 1966 he built motor-driven robots, including the mechanical hound for François Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451, a film prop engineered to behave like a living creature on screen. By the early 1980s he was working extensively with computer-aided design tools. Using CAD together with differential geometry, computational conformal mapping, and multilinear perspective, he explored how figures and space could expand, twist, or shift under new sets of rules. Many works from this period use classically proportioned figures as their starting point, which he then reworked through computational transformations so that forms appear stretched or redirected by the underlying calculations. The impact of this process is visible both in the imagery and in the shape of the paintings, with passages that swell or compress, corners that drift slightly out of square, and edges that register subtle traces of the distortions.

Castro-Cid first exhibited at La Libertad Gallery in Santiago in 1960, followed a year later by a show at the Pan American Union in Washington. After settling in New York, he presented solo exhibitions at Richard Feigen Gallery, Galería Bonino in Buenos Aires, and the Center for Inter-American Relations. His work was also seen in group shows including the Carnegie International in 1964. Later presentations at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Jewish Museum, and the DIA Art Foundation further established his place in the field of technological art. He received two Guggenheim Fellowships and the William Copley Award, and in 1968 was invited to the University of Illinois as visiting artist. His work entered major collections including the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Pérez Art Museum Miami, the Menil Collection in Houston, and the Lowe Art Museum in Miami. His experimentation with early CAD systems and mathematically structured distortions is recognized as a central part of his contribution to the history of computation within Latin American art. He passed away in 1992 while visiting Santiago.