Clay Hernandez Cuba, b. 1985

Galerie von Opel is delighted to present the work of Clay Hernandez, in collaboration with  Museum Mater (Barcelona). The exhibition will be on view in our gallery from October 5 to November 9.

Clay is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice centers on video art as a medium of resistance, reflection, and dialogue. His work rejects victimhood, instead affirming his role as a citizen of the world. Racism, climate change, gender equality, violence, and social justice are not peripheral concerns but central themes of his artistic discourse. For Clay, art is inseparable from the urgent realities of our time, a direct response to a planet in imminent danger.

His studio is his iPhone, and his technique fuses video with painterly sensibility. Each of his works, lasting just one minute and unfolding on a human scale, demands the viewer’s full attention. They are mirrors that gaze back at us; both questioning and accepting, balancing judgement with affirmation.

Through the lens of the front camera, Clay transforms self-portraiture into an act of introspection. His videos are not “selfies” but exercises in awareness, where the artist and the spectator meet in a silent yet profound dialogue. The screen becomes a site of encounter, where subject and object merge, and the immediacy of presence takes on poetic and political weight. When the screen is on, Clay is present. His art is presence, questioning, and resistance, an urgent invitation to witness and to reflect.