Art of Cuba

Edgy and Provocative

Here are just a few of the Cuban artists we represent in our gallery. Click on a thumbnail image to learn more about that artist and to view examples of his or her work.

---

Kamyl Bullaudy

Eduardo Expósito

Alfredo Manzo

Existing — no, flourishing — as it does, often on the periphery of bureaucratic officialdom within the weird environment of a sclerotic Communist regime lurching into its twilight years, the contemporary Cuban art scene is notable for nothing if not its versatility. Drawing inspiration from their past as well as their future, these artists of necessity combine in their work elements from the antipodes of experience: fatalism and survival, irony and earnesness, intellect and passion, anger and humor.

Many of these characteristics can be seen in the work of the artists above whose work is on display at Galerie Lakaye. All of them, both established and on-the-rise, are true inheritors of the Cuban artistic tradition, which is long, vast, and rich.

Theirs can be an exquisitely intellectual style of art, not at all primitive — or, if so, then it is primitivism of the most aesthetic and cerebral kind. In any case, their great appeal to Western collectors is that this art is real, not a pose, felt passionately even under the most adverse of circumstances. Writing in Newsweek (30 Nov. 1992, pp. 76-78), critic Peter Plagens expressed it best:

Here come the Cubans. Artists from that fading citadel of Soviet-style communism are everywhere these days in the most freebooting of all capitalist enterprises, the Western art world.... [T]he Cuban artists may be on the brink of changing the face of contemporary art.

---

«« back to top