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Contemporary Art Gallery

555 Nelson Street
Vancouver, Canada
Open from Tuesday to
Sunday 12 pm → 6 pm

Admission always free
ArchiveExhibition
22 Mar 97until10 May 97

New Art from Cuba: Utopian Territories

Abel Barroso, Los Carpinteros, Luis Gomez, René Francisco, Esterio Segura, Tonel, Kcho, Carlos Garaicoa

555 Hamilton St

Detail of an illustration. The image shows a bottom part of wooden bridge. A bucket and a tray, filled with water, are placed under the columns.

This multi-venue exhibition includes the work of artists who have been recognized as bringing renewed vitality to the Cuban art scene in the 1990s. These artists draw upon both vernacular and officially sanctioned iconography to comment on the complexity and contradiction inherent in contemporary Cuban culture at a time of political and economic uncertainty. They negotiate ways to express their role as artists, individuals and members of society within a communist nation courting small scale free enterprise and foreign investment in an effort to regain its stability.

The Contemporary Art Gallery component of this exhibition contains drawings and sketches that present the art object at its genesis, as a work in process, and in many cases as projects that will never be realized because of scale or limited access to materials. These works represent the idea-making stage of the artist's creative process, where the imagination has free reign and developing projects is unrestricted by concerns of feasibility.

This exhibition is organized by the Contemporary Art Gallery and the Morris & Helen Belkin Art Gallery in association with the Fundación Ludwig de Cuba. Other venues for New Art from Cuba: Utopian Territories include the Morris & Helen Belkin Art Gallery, ACCESS Gallery, Artspeak Gallery, Charles H. Scott Gallery, OR Gallery.

Curated by Eugenio Valdés Figueroa and Juan Antonio Molina