The Internet Travel Guide "Getting to Know Cuba"

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The decade of the 70s

The decade of the 70s was a time when sketches and graphic art flourished, represented by: Roberto Fabelo, Pedro Pablo Oliva, Zaida del Río, Nelson Domínguez, Eduardo Roca (Choco) … Pop, integrated in a political-cultural framework, makes its appearance in the works of Raúl Martínez. Humberto Peña also presents a personal concept of this trend and, like José Luis Posada and Santiago Chago Armada was an important forerunner of the following generation. Alfredo Sosabravo was notable in this period for his particular sense of humor; Manuel Mendive for the subject, Afro, and a deliberate Primitivism; Ever Fonseca through the treatment of popular Cuban mythology and Flora Font through peasants´ legends. The Photorealism of Thomas Sánchez, César Leal, Nélida López, Gilberto Frómeta, Aldo Menéndez and Flavio Garciandía was prominent in the seventies through the adaptation of the themes of Cuban society to this language.

Autor: Mariano Rodríguez Titel: "Gallo con flores" 99.7 x 121.7 cm 1979

In the following years a network of cultural institutions developed offering specialized exhibitions. In 1963 a studio for serigraphy was installed in the UNEAC (Cuban Association of Writers and Artists) and in 1979 the Casas de las Américas organized a workshop where the works of Cuban and Latin American artists could be duplicated using serigraphy. However, it was not until 1983, with the foundation of the Taller Experimental de Serigrafía René Portocarrero that serigraphy became the method of duplication preferred by artists for the reproduction of their works, leading to a veritable boom in artistic serigraphy. The eighties mark the third turning point in our artistic production and a peak in the heyday of Cuban sculpture. A new generation of visual artists from the Instituto Superior de Arte (College of Art) were the driving force; for them artistic creation signified a cognoscitive, probing and intellectual motivation, in harmony with the times of "Desecularization" of art and in a time of the predominance of orthodox and schematic thought in national reality, against which the artist expresses his dissatisfaction. An emancipatory movement combining the hopes of the old avant-garde, and which causes a factor of non-communication between the artistic and the institutional sector to appear, is also a transgressing, desanctifying movement, which, in its language and poetry, integrates with the present Postmodernism. In general outlines the historic-political interpretation is reinforced by the analysis of historical values and patriotic symbols; the specific values of art are emphasized and appropriation is adopted, installations, ready mode, conceptual and factual, as well as ephemeral art: Happenings and Performance (the groups Puré and Arte Calle). The visual communication of folk art, kitsch, jokes, anthropological and nature-encompassing considerations, myths, the native element of our culture and the identity of Latin America and the third world have been adopted. New themes emerge, painting and other branches of artistic creation exchange relationships with each other, with the greatest possible freedom of technique, with mixed techniques preferred in many cases. The exhibition Volume I gives an impetus to expressing this new sensitivity. José Bedia and Ricardo Rodríguez Brey are seeking the roots of their native culture; José Toirac, Juan Ballester, Tanya Angulo and Ileana Villazón are reflecting on art. Rubén Torres Llorca and also Flabio Garciandía take folk art and its relationship to politics as their reference; Lázaro Saavedra deals with ideology, art and religion with great humor; Reynerio Tamayo follows the same lines by using humor against criticism and Ciro Quintana exercises criticism through Cuban humor. Carlos Rodríguez Cárdenas handles themes which appear problematic in their contemporary context: tourism, emigration, the mystification of political elements; Glexis Novoa creates visual works and installations, which allude to the values honored by political propaganda, René Francisco and Eduardo Ponjuán express the void of the postulates of socialist realism. Humberto Castro, Gustavo Acosta, Segundo Planes, Ana Alberina Delgado, Lázaro García , Félix Suazo, Leandro Soto, Arturo Cuenca, Luis Gómez, Gustavo Pérez Monzón and Consuelo Castañeda, are only a few of the names in a long list which have for many years drawn attention to the diversity of the panorama of contemporary Cuban sculpture and the difficulty of identifying any common characteristics, other than that of diversity itself.





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