| CARLOS R. CARDENAS |
Born in Villa Clara, Cuba, in 1962, Carlos Cardenas studied at the Escuela Nacional de Arte, Havana, and at the Instituto Superior de Arte, Havana. He has had solo exhibitions at Fredric Snitzer Gallery, Coral Gables; Galeria Ramis F. Barquet, Monterrey, Mexico; and Galeria Nina Menocal, Mexico, D.F. He has also shown his work at the Centro de Cultura Contemporanea, Barcelona; the Bronx Museum, New York, and in the groundbreaking 1990 exhibition, CUBA OK, at the Künsthalle, Düsseldorf. A recipient of the Joan Miró International Drawing Prize, Cardenas is represented in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Museum Ludwig, Cologne; the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Havana; and the Museum of Art, Fort Lauderdale.
Cardenas is known for his simple, graphically powerful pictures which illustrate political slogans, popular sayings, and other clichés of Cuban life. Cardenas combines these texts with faux-naïve, cartoon-like images which ironically undercut their stereotypical meaning, rendering them ambiguous and sometimes even absurd. In its irreverence, humor, and socio-political content, Cardenas’s work is tied in with a generation of Cuban artists who came of age in the mid-1980s, such as Lazaro Saavedra Gonzalez and Glexis Novoa Vian.
|
|
|