David Cuesta is a London-based contemporary artist whose multidisciplinary practice engages with posthumanism, postcolonial theory, and the Latin American diaspora. Working across sculpture, video, painting, and performance, he explores the tension between the natural and the artificial, often through minimalist structures, symbolic geometries, and speculative forms. Cuesta’s work interrogates colonial legacy, ecological systems, and constructed identities through an aesthetic rooted in artifice and deconstruction.

Born in Calgary, Canada, to Colombian parents, Cuesta relocated to the UK in 1983 before spending formative years in Vancouver. He studied at the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design and was active in Vancouver’s independent art scene in the late 1990s and early 2000s, contributing to publications like Some Magazine and Others Magazine, and exhibiting in artist-run spaces such as the Video Inn and the Helen Pitt Gallery. His work also includes album artwork and graphics, which feeds into a conceptual design language that continues to inform his fine art practice.

In 2018–2019, Cuesta was awarded a residency at the Florence Trust, in London, UK, where he developed a body of work examining the performativity and artifice of the studio space. This led to two solo exhibitions in 2023: Senescence at Pocko Gallery, featuring sculptural works and a video filmed in Colombia exploring themes of death and rebirth; and Apocrypha at Filet Gallery, presenting paintings, sculptures, and film rooted in mysticism, psychological shadows, and fractured urban-nature ecologies. His practice often deploys repetitive hand-drawn geometries, architectural elements, and digital processes as tools of conceptual investigation.

Following a recent residency in Iquitos, Peru, Cuesta is developing a new video work rooted in his research into colonial-era expeditions in the Amazon Basin. His ongoing investigations engage with the entangled legacies of ecological and cultural extraction. His work contributes to critical conversations in contemporary fine art around decolonisation, artificial intelligence, land-based practice, and the speculative futures of the natural environment.