Antonia Eiriz, the Cuban artist, was born in 1929 in the Juanelo neighborhood of Havana. In 1953, she entered the Academia Nacional de Arte in San Alejandro, focusing on fine arts.
In 1954, she enrolled in the Grupo de los once, in favour of the abstract language with expressionist overtones. The painter produced most of her work during the 60s, giving up its abstract aspect while maintaining an expressionist approach. Eiriz’s work, unmistakably neo-figurative, portrayed distorted and grotesque human figures, often with open mouths conveying cries of anguish or grimaces hinting at darker deeds.
The masterpiece we have at our gallery today, La Imagen from 1966, marks the beginning of a new figuration in the Cuban arts. In this piece, Antonia makes an allusion to the propaganda machinery that was forced in Cuba in the 1960s, creating the image of a monster that is projected on the left side of the canvas, identifiable by the hand and index finger gesture.
In 1968, Eiriz paused her artistic career when the Cuban government deemed her masterpiece, A platform for democratic peace, exhibited at the national salon, as “defeatist,” a veiled accusation of counterrevolutionary sentiment. Then she made the decision that, If she wasn’t allowed to paint what she desired, she was no longer going to paint at all. After 1968, she shifted her focus to teaching, being a professor of contemporary masters like Tomas Sanchez, Roberto Fabelo and Pedro Pablo Oliva, as well as inspiring the future generations in art.
In 1993 she moved to Miami and in 1994, she received a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Her works are housed in prestigious institutions such as the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Havana and the NSU Art Museum in Fort Lauderdale. She passed away in Miami in 1995 from a heart attack at the age of sixty-six.
