San Gimignano
Beijing
Les Moulins
Habana
Roma
Sao Paulo
Paris
Born in Rio de Janeiro in 1991, Yhuri Cruz studied Political Science because he dreamed of becoming a diplomat - hence his intention to use art to personify agents of power, create dialogues and establish spaces for negotiation. Teaching English, he raised the money to hold his first exhibition, "Pretofagia", at the Centro Municipal de Artes Hélio Oiticica, in Rio de Janeiro, in 2019, the same year he was nominated for the PIPA Prize. He also won the Reynaldo Roels Award with the public installation "The Horse is Rising: Monument to Oxalá and the workers". He also won the Foco ArtRio Prize in 2023, the year in which he held his second solo show "REVENGUÊ: Uma exposição-cena" at the Rio Art Museum. His work is in public and private collections.
A highlight of the contemporary art scene, Yhuri Cruz revisits the collective and individual imagination to (re)write stories of futures.
A Rio de Janeiro artist, represented by Galleria Continua São Paulo, his current production is marked by his relationship with monuments, historical archives, fictions and fabrications of the black diaspora in Brazil and around the world.
A playwright and visual artist, he sets out to reinvent pasts and establish new futures, crossing reality and fiction through his long series of performances, which the artist himself calls "Cenas Pretofágicas" (Emancipation Plays). This is how the work of Yhuri Cruz from Rio de Janeiro develops, based especially on the staging of black historical fictions and the expanded investigation of sculpture, drawing, film and the arts of presence.
