Diego Masera

Diego Masera is a former diplomat and cultural interlocutor whose work explores international exchange, social dialogue, and contemporary cultural production. Drawing on his background in international development, environmental policy, and work with communities affected by inequality and climate crisis, Masera approaches art as a form of knowledge capable of expressing what political and institutional language often cannot.

In 2026, Masera and David Krut had a chance meeting where they found themselves discussing the artist’s practice and his installation, Home – ikhaya, NIROX sculpture park. This encounter resulted in David extending and invitiation towards Masera to come into the workshop and explore printmaking. In March of that year, Masera began his collaboration with Roxy Kaczmarek, working on a body of monotypes and other works of paper. In July 2026, Masera had his first exhibition with the gallery entitled HOPE / Against the Grammar of Violence, which sought to recover the language of peace before it disappears from public imagination.

Diego Masera is a conceptual artist based in South Africa whose work across painting, sculpture, and installation is shaped by displacement, memory, and the enduring search for home. Forced into exile as a child during Argentina’s military dictatorship, he grew up in Mexico, where his early encounter with color, form, and cultural plurality first opened a path toward art. That experience of loss, movement, and adaptation left a lasting imprint on his practice, which continues to reflect on belonging, fragility, inequality, and human resilience. Masera later studied in Italy before moving to Kenya, where an intended period of volunteer work became a decade of life and engagement in Africa. Over the years, he developed a parallel career in sustainable industrial development, working across Africa, Latin America, Asia, and Europe on questions of material production, livelihoods, climate, and social transformation. He completed a PhD at the Royal College of Art in London, bringing critical reflection to the relationship between development, culture, and lived experience. Today, fully committed to his artistic practice, Masera brings together a life lived across continents, disciplines, and histories. His work is informed by migration, social memory, and the tension between beauty and injustice, intimacy and structure, object and story. Through image, material, and space, he seeks to create works that speak quietly but insistently about dignity, coexistence, and the human need to imagine forms of home in a fractured world.