Cuban artists, Cuba, Wilfredo Lamb, Raul Cordero, Ernesto Rancaño, Nelson Domínguez, Alexis Leyva (Kcho), Los Carpinteros, Ever Fonseca, Ernesto Leal, Joan Capote

Damián Aquiles
(1972)

Aquiles has obsessively favoured scrap material from the bodywork of old cars or containers of the most varied types to make small walking human figures, or perfectly flattened squares grouped according to an impeccable arrangement. He has not abandoned canvas, however, using a combination of techniques to produce an abstract work where graffiti connotes the emotional impact in the direction that the artist is interested in.

Cuban art has over recent years managed to re-establish itself as one of the most interesting new sources of art work. A new generation of artists now complement the Cuban masters from the early 20th Century and the indefatigable Wilfredo Lamb. We provide 25 short summaries of a selection of the very best Cuban artists of the 20th Century.

A rebel by nature, he transmitted his aggressiveness to his avant-garde painting, especially after his bohemian period in Paris, constantly experimenting with movement revealed in his violent, transgressive erotic paintings, with his expert use of transparency and an absolute mastery of composition, light and colour.

Obsessed by architecture, especially Havana's, which has been sketched, photographed, filmed, made into models or installations, documented in all its splendour or its destruction, dreamt and remade, the artist uses the city as leitmotiv to express his critical view of history, society and the process of art itself. With a vision much indebted to literature, to narration, which leads him frequently to use texts as part of his works, he is set on revealing secrets that enable a critical interpretation of the environment and its situations.

Possessor of dazzling virtuosity and precise use of the principles of universal art, debtor in his beginnings of lyrical expressionism and neo- expressionism, he has finally installed medieval and Renaissance tradition in postmodernism in works that refer to the disquieting reality of dreams.