They come from Havana. They grew up in their neighbourhoods (Lugarno, Pogolotti) 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) and Juan Roberto Diago (1971) belong to three generations of artists driven by the same desire to search, to unravel an archaic brutally sequestered identity, …
They come from Havana. They grew up in their neighbourhoods (Lugarno, Pogolotti) 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) and Juan Roberto Diago (1971) belong to three generations of artists driven by the same desire to search, to unravel an archaic brutally sequestered identity, a forgotten past and origins leading to them, only recognisable in the DNA of their rites and rituals.
Manuel Mendive soon came to understand that Africa provided, as Wifredo Lam believed, the …
