About

They come from Havana. They grew up in their neighbourhoods and today their names have shaped the history of Cuban contemporary art over the past five decades. Manuel Mendive (1944), José Bedia (1959), René Peña (1957), Juan Roberto Diago (1971) and Raúl Cordero (1971).

Manuel Mendive soon came to understand that Africa provided, as Wifredo Lam believed, the spiritual mud through which new Cuban art would bear fruit, paving the way for a “re-reading of the ancestral memory that ushered in postmodernity in Cuban visual arts” (Guillermina Ramos). For his part, José Bedia had the privilege of …