Carlos Sandoval (Mexico City, 1956) is a Berlin-based artist working across sound, video, drawing, performance, instrument construction, and mechanical sculpture. Born in a working-class barrio in downtown Mexico City, he grew up between street life and a household of artists — painters David Alfaro Siqueiros, Elizabeth Catlett, and Mariana Yampolsky among the family's circle — an early immersion in social reality and artistic practice that shaped everything that followed.

He began his musical formation at the Escuela Nacional de Música, UNAM, before pursuing composition, analysis, and theory privately with Julio Estrada (1985–90). He built and voiced pianos at the Bösendorfer factory in Vienna, studied analogue photography and digital video across three countries, and worked for three years as assistant to Conlon Nancarrow in Mexico City (1991–94) — an experience that rooted his practice firmly in the material and mechanical rather than the purely academic.

From 1999 to 2018 he held consecutive fellowships from Mexico's Sistema Nacional de Creadores de Arte, one of the country's highest artistic distinctions. He has been commissioned by the ensembles Mosaik, Liminar, Vertixe Sonora and Contrechamps, also by the Americas Society, the Siemens Stiftung, the Grazer Kunstverein, and numerous other institutions and musicians across Europe and the Americas. His work has been presented in Austria, China, Cuba, France, Germany, Italy, Mexico, the Netherlands, Palestine, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

He moved to Berlin in 2003 and became also a German citizen in 2009. His practice is organized around a dual ontology — oscillating between humans understood as machines and machines perceived as human — a framework running across nearly four decades of work in multiple media. His most recent series, the Monas, are sounding mechanical automata built from found objects, crude mechanics, and off-center weights, exhibited alongside the Tent Visions ink drawings. Both emerged from extended periods spent with his dog in dense forests and ecological reserves, and are understood as autobiographical objects — self-portraits in wood, plastics, steel, and mark-making.