Contemporary Art Gallery Online is Celebrating Hispanic Heritage Month
Below please find a short synopsis of the Artists we are Celebrating this year.
Pablo Picasso is considered one of the most iconic artists of the 20th century, one of the main forces behind modern art as we know it. He is also famous for co-creating Cubism. Born in Spain in 1881, Picasso was a child prodigy who created approximately 50,000 works of art over his lifetime. These included paintings, drawings, sculptures, ceramics, and more. Though trained in classical methods, Picasso broke away from those traditions to produce an astonishingly diverse and innovative body of work.
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Diego Velázquez, a Spanish painter, was born in 1599 in Madrid. He served as a royal painter under King Philip IV for 40 years, often commissioned to do portraits of members of court. Veláquez’s work stood out from the Baroque-style painting of his peers, paving the way for realist and impressionist painters in the 19th century. He remains one of the all-time most famous and influential Hispanic painters.
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Frida Kahlo was born in 1907, Kahlo experienced several tragic events while growing up: Polio at age 6, and an accident at age 18. Her paintings, many of which are self-portraits, reflect this suffering and an introspective look into her life. Throughout her life, Kahlo moved in politically active circles. In 1929, she married artist and activist Diego Rivera, a relationship that would prove tumultuous. Though an early death in 1954 cut Kahlo’s career short, her work remains among the most celebrated of Mexico and a hallmark of surrealist painting.bians Organizing for Change. Interest in Frida Kahlo’s life and work has soared in recent decades, as a Mexican artist and feminist icon. Even her self-expression and colorful, vivid personal style have sparked special interest in recent times.
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Slvador Dali was born in Spain in 1904, Dalí was a prolific painter, sculptor, photographer, filmmaker, and illustrator. He felt the death of his mother at age 16 deeply, who had always been sympathetic to his character and interests. He met his wife Elena in 1929, a partnership that helped to support the practical aspects of his art career.
One of the most important figures in the modern art movement, Dalí once said, “Begin by learning to draw and paint like the old masters. After that, you can do as you like; everyone will respect you.” Dalí certainly “did as he liked,” and his innovative work reflected his own flamboyant and unconventional personality and style. An unruly art student who bucked the norms, he nevertheless went on to produce a vast array of Surrealist art and become one of the most famous Hispanic artists of the 20th century.
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Jean-Michel Basquiat was born in New York City in 1960 to a Haitian father and Puerto Rican mother. Before his teens he was fluent in Spanish, English, and French. Basquiat gained notoriety first as a graffiti artist, under the pseudonym SAMO and part of the underground art movement in the 70s. Soon after, his paintings began to be exhibited and sold on the international scene. (In 2017, his work set a record for most expensive painting sold by a U.S.-born artist, at $110.5 million.)
Basquiat’s work reflects themes such as poverty, systematic racism, colonialism, and classism. His unstable childhood and skyrocket to fame at a young age were difficult, and probably led to his drug dependency. He died of an overdose in 1988, at only 27 years old.
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Diego Rivera was born in 1886 in Mexico. Showing talent at an early age, Rivera studied both in Mexico City and Europe. However, his deep concerns were the struggles of the indigenous and working-class peoples, along with interest in Marxist ideologies. Rivera, who married fellow artist Frida Kahlo, is most famous for his murals, which pay tribute to Mayan and Aztec imagery. He completed several commissions from the Mexican government and participated in exhibitions in the U.S. (where his nods to Marxist figures did not go over well). Rivera is remembered for helping to propel Mexican art onto the international scene.
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Francisco Goya was born in Spain in 1746, Francisco Goya was one of the most successful artists of the 18th and 19th centuries. He became a court painter for the Spanish court in 1786 and was commissioned many times to do royal portraits. His work reflects the Romantic movement, and his style reflected a bridge between the “Old Masters” and a newer, modern period. Goya’s later work included scenes from the Peninsular War with Napoleon in 1807, as well as more politically motivated pieces. After rising to the highest position for a royal court painter, he moved to France until his death, disappointed by political and social movements within Spain.
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José Clemente Orozco was a Mexican painter born in 1883. Born to a working class family, who often struggled to make ends meet, Orozco also came of age during the beginnings of the Mexican Revolution. Just as he was beginning formal studies in art, he suffered an accident that resulted in the loss of his entire left hand. After working a time as a caricaturist, Orozco began painting murals in 1922. These murals and frescoes would become his great legacy, featured and commissioned both in and out of Mexico.
Orozco’s intricate murals feature themes of suffering, along with political messages on workers, peasants, and social justice. Together with Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros, he helped bring about an movement of globally renowned Mexican muralists.
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Fernando Botero born in Colombia in 1932, is the only living artist on this list– and among the most famous Latin American living artists. A sculptor and painter, he is characterized by his exaggerated style of round shapes and figures, known as “Boterismo.” Botero studied extensively and lived both in Europe and the United States, but considers his work uniquely Colombian. His paintings and sculptures have achieved international fame.
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Tarsila do Amaral was a Brazilian painter, draftswoman, and translator. She is considered one of the leading Latin American modernist artists, and is regarded as the painter who best achieved Brazilian aspirations for nationalistic expression in a modern style. As a member of the Grupo dos Cinco, Tarsila is also considered a major influence in the modern art movement in Brazil, alongside Anita Malfatti, Menotti Del Picchia, Mário de Andrade, and Oswald de Andrade. She was instrumental in the formation of the aesthetic movement,
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Leonora Carrington OBE - which means (1917-2011) was a British-born Mexican artist, surrealist painter, and novelist. She lived most of her adult life in Mexico City and was one of the last surviving participants in the Surrealist movement of the 1930s. Carrington was also a founding member of the women's liberation movement in Mexico during the 1970s.
OBE - The Most Excellent Order of the British Empire is a British order of chivalry, rewarding contributions to the arts and sciences, work with charitable and welfare organisations, and public service outside the civil service.
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Luz Donoso Puelma was born in 1921 in Santiago, Chile, died January 18, 2008), also known as Luz Donoso, was a Chilean graphic artist, muralist, political activist, and teacher. Beginning in the mid 1960s, Donoso was one of the most prominent participants in the muralist movement that supported Salvador Allende’s presidential campaign. In the first months of the dictatorship she was dismissed from her teaching position at the University of Chile, like many of her colleagues, and shortly after co-founded an artist run work space and forum, Taller de Artes Visuales (TAV).
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Margarita Azurdia was born in 1931 in Antigua, Guatemala, in Guatemala City, Guatemala), who also worked under the pseudonyms Margot Fanjul, Margarita Rita Rica Dinamita, and Anastasia Margarita, was a feminist Guatemalan sculptor, painter, poet, and performance artist. Azurdia's work reflects her feminist and anti-establishment views. In the 1960s, Azurdia publicly opposed neofigurativism (neofigurativismo), an art movement promoted by a group of male artists known as Grupo Vertebra, and was responsible for starting a new art movement known as new conceptual abstraction (nuevo abstraccionismo conceptual). After spending eight years in Paris where she focused on her poetry and painting, Azurdia returned to Guatemala in 1982, where she defended animal rights, gave workshops on the origins of sacred dance, and continued to write poetry. In 1982, she was a founder of the group Laboratory of Creativity (Laboratorio de Creatividad) that experimented with performance art in public spaces, theater cafes, art galleries, and museums. Through this group, Azurdia explored the notions of ritual in everyday life, space, and time through the medium of dance.
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Anita Malfatti was born in 1889 and is heralded as the first Brazilian artist to introduce European and American forms of Modernism to Brazil. Her solo exhibition in Sao Paulo, from 1917–1918, was controversial at the time, and her expressionist style and subject were revolutionary for the complacently old-fashioned art expectations of Brazilians who were searching for a national identity in art, but who were not prepared for the influences Malfatti would bring to the country. Malfatti's presence was also highly felt during the Week of Modern Art (Semana de Arte Moderna) in 1922, where she and the Group of Five made huge revolutionary changes in the structure and response to modern art in Brazil.
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Clemencia Lucena was a Postwar & Contemporary artist who was born in 1945. Her work was featured in an exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. The artist died in 1983.
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Amelia Pelaez was born in 1896 in Yaguajay, in the former Cuban province of Las Villas (now Sancti Spíritus Province). She was the fifth born of eleven siblings in a family that was part of the Cuban-Creole middle class. Her father was a doctor, Manuel Pelaez y Laredo, and her mother, Maria del Carmen del Casal y Lastra, stayed at home with her children. Amelia's uncle was Julian del Casal, who was a poet and included her family in Cuba's intellectual circles.
In 1935-1936, Pelaez focused much of her paintings and drawings to the use of ink and pencil. The treatment of these drawings differs than her previous oil works, by distorting and exaggerating the figure with "sinuous line and light shading" that reference Cubism and European Modernism
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