Cuban Art and Artists
Information about Cuban Art and the Cuban important artists as an expression of plurality and artistic ideas brought to the island, especially by Spanish colonists and slaves from Africa until passage of time helped emerge the Cuban national identity
1/16/2018
11/06/2017
Alicia de la Campa Pak CUBAN ARTIST
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Her work has been exhibited in major solo and group shows in Cuba, Japan, Spain, Mexico, Chile, France, Brazil, and the United States. De la Campa is a master of dramatic surrealism, using scenes, poses, costumes and Western art-extracted characters depicted in a mythical dimensions. Using her own body as inspiration, de la Campa’s work often deals with eroticism and the woman’s role in Cuban life.
Alicia de la Campa Pak(Cuban, born )
A Cuban artist of South Korean descent, is one of the key figures in the Cuban cultural landscape. She began her artistic training at the Elementary School of Fine Arts, later graduating from the San Alejandro Art Academy in Havana, where she is currently a professor of art. She works in a range of media, including painting, drawing, illustrating, and engraving, and is a writer and illustrator for numerous cultural publications, as well as being a member of the National Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba.Her work has been exhibited in major solo and group shows in Cuba, Japan, Spain, Mexico, Chile, France, Brazil, and the United States. De la Campa is a master of dramatic surrealism, using scenes, poses, costumes and Western art-extracted characters depicted in a mythical dimensions. Using her own body as inspiration, de la Campa’s work often deals with eroticism and the woman’s role in Cuban life.
11/24/2016
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Latin American art sells for $22.7 million at Christie's auction
Christie's on Wednesday, November 23 wrapped up one of its biggest auctions of Latin American art at $22.7 million, with seven Cuban painters drawing record prices as interest in the region's artists climbs, according to AFP.
In a two-day sale, Christie's auctioned nearly 300 lots of five major private collections. Although the total came in below the expected $30 million, it was still one of the auction house's largest takes for Latin American art.
"There were strong results for the collection of Cuban works belonging to a single owner, with active bids that earned many lots more than double the initial estimates," Virgilio Garza, Christie's Latin American art chief, said in a statement.
"This auction means that modern Cuban painting is back," he added. Buyers from 36 countries took part in the bidding.
"Sandias" ("Watermelons") by Mexican artist Rufino Tamayo, an almost abstract work of explosive colors, drew the highest sale price: $2.16 million after a telephone fight between two buyers.
"The subject of Tamayo's 'Watermelons' is perhaps one of the most recurrent and most important in his work. And he is very personal, almost nostalgic about his childhood and his people, Oaxaca," Marisol Nieves, a Latin American art expert.
Seven Cuban artists obtained record prices for their work -- six modernists and one contemporary -- including Mariano Rodriguez for "Pelea de gallos," ("Cockfight") which was sold for $1.08 million.
Most of the Cuban works came from a mysterious Cuban-American seller living in Florida who amassed an impressive collection of modern Cuban art for more than 30 years.
Other Cubans who achieved record prices for works were Esterio Segura, Fidelio Ponce de Leon, Carlos Enriquez, Rene Portocarrero, Victor Manuel and Domingo Ramos.
Two other artists broke their own records at the auction: Uruguay's Pablo Atchugarry for a marble sculpture which sold at $ 439,500, and Argentina's Guillermo Kuitca for his triptych "Deng Haag-Praha" painted on mattresses for the Biennale de Sao Paulo in 1989, which sold for $511,500.
By PanARMENIAN.Net
3/02/2016
Carmen Herrera,important Cuban artist, Turns 100 Years Old
Carmen Herrera, Who Sold Her First Painting Aged 89, Turns 100 Years Old
If the life story of Carmen Herrera was written as fiction, many people wouldn't believe it.
As Deborah Sontag wrote in a front page story for the New York Times Art & Design section in 2009: "In a word, Ms. Herrera, a nonagenarian homebound painter with arthritis, is hot."
The artist had her first sale at the age of 89. In her 90s, her work became part of the permanent collections of MoMA, the Hirshhorn, and Tate Modern. After 60 years of honing and practicing her craft, creating brilliantly-colored and ever more minimal and pure geometric abstractions, Herrera is finally receiving her due in critical, institutional and collecting circles alike (see Imi Knoebel, Marianne Vitale, and Carmen Herrera Among Robust Sales at Armory Show 2014 and Sales Heat Up at Frieze New York).
The Cuban-born, Manhattan-based artist marks her first century this May 31. “Life is wonderful and funny," Herrera told W Magazine. “And then you get to be 100."
This spring, Alison Klayman directed a brief but fascinating new documentary about Herrera's life and her recent rise to fame in the art world. The film, titled, The 100 Years Picture Show—starring Carmen Herrera, premiered at this year's Hot Docs Film Festival in Toronto.
Herrera's diptych Blanco y Verde (1959) is now on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art's debut exhibition in its new Meatpacking location, titled, "America is Hard to See." Her paintings, if you look at them carefully, can almost seem like cuts in space," curator Dana Miller says in an audio guide for the show.
The artist, who had previously studied architecture, has long been fascinated by spatial arrangements. For the upcoming London edition of Frieze this October, the Lisson Gallery in London, which represents her, is planning a solo show of her large-scale paintings at the fair.
In a 2010 interview before a previous exhibition at Lisson, Herrera told Hermoine Hoby at the Observer, "When you're known you want to do the same thing again to please people. And, as nobody wanted what I did, I was pleasing myself, and that's the answer."
The artnet Price Database lists 15 of her works at auction, the most expensive of which is one sold for $170,500, at a November 2012 auction at Christie's New York.
The artist, who was born in Havana in 1915, moved to the US in 1939 with her husband Jesse Loewenthal, a poet and longtime Stuyvesant High School teacher. After spending a few years in Paris following World War II—where Herrera told the Times she found her own "pictorial vocabulary," and exhibited alongside artists including Josef Albers, Jean Arp, Sonia Delauney, and others, the couple returned to New York in 1954. For decades, Herrera has occupied the same loft, which also serves as her studio, near Union Square.
Over the years Herrera has been friends with artists ranging from Cuban star Wifredo Lam, to Yves Klein, and Barnett Newman (see New Collectors Fuel Demand and Double Estimates at Latin American Art Sales and Frida Kahlo Export Market Booming Despite Export Restrictions). She also knew Jean Genet, whom she calls "a sweet man."
The documentary includes intimate scenes of Herrera and her assistants at work, conversations with Herrera and her close friends about her life and work, and talks with art experts including Walker Art Center director Olga Viso and curator Dana Miller.
"She gets up every morning and makes art. It's a compulsion. It's what sustains her," Miller says.
Herrera, who is wry and charming, quotes an old saying: "If you wait for the bus, it will come. I waited 98 years for the bus to come."
She adds with a laugh: "Nobody cared what I did…It was a hard thing to get people to accept it. Now they've accepted it. That's okay with me."
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