| LUIS CRUZ AZACETA |
Born in Havana in 1942, Luis Cruz Azaceta emigrated to the U.S. shortly after Castro’s revolution. Upon graduating from the School of Visual Arts in New York in 1966, he began to depict urban life in New York in an expressionistic mode influenced by comic books, the Chicago Imagists, graffiti art, and the late work of Philip Guston. Cruz Azaceta has had solo exhibitions at the Rhode Island School of Design Art Museum, the Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans, and the Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art. A recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Cintas Foundation, Cruz Azaceta is represented in the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Miami Art Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, among other public collections.
In a 1998 interview, Cruz Azaceta said "I paint what I see around me, and I look with an accusing eye at what man has created…I am just a filter, a many colored voice…I paint to kill La Muerte, and also to kill Cruelty, Injustice, Violence, Ignorance and Hypocrisy.” Cruz Azaceta’s principal motif is the human figure, and his themes have centered around urban violence and homelessness, the abuses of dictatorships and mismanaged governments, and the scourge of AIDS. In the later 1990s he began to explore more universal dilemmas of human existence, such as isolation and estrangement, in simplified, monochromatic, images such as Bureaucrat of 1997. Although his work has subsequently become increasingly abstract and more vividly colored, Cruz Azaceta remains committed to making his art a vehicle for ethical and existential commentary.
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