Cuban artist Gustavo PÉREZ MONSOON (b. 1956, Sancti Spiritus, Cuba) returns from a 30-year hiatus from making art with an exhibition of new work at the Richard Saltoun Gallery until next January 5th. The exhibition marks the artist's UK debut and presents a new installation of materials suspended in space, created especially for the gallery's location on Dover Street. The installation will be presented alongside a selection of works on board, all created in the last year.
Combining art and epistemology, Gustavo Pérez Monzón's work is characterized by an intrinsic interest in logic and meaning.
While his work is based on a framework of conceptual art, drawing on sources as diverse as mathematics, numerology and occultism, as well as existentialism and our relationship to the universe.
Through paintings, drawings, sculptures and large-scale installations, Pérez Monzón uses organic materials and geometric shapes to give importance to space and the sensory stimulation that comes from its change.
Taking mathematical philosophical cues as a main starting point, her recent works incorporate a range of mixed materials, with repetitive patterns of staples, twisted lines and amorphous shapes. These new works, together with a site-specific installation, testify to a unique artistic language that Pérez Monzón has constantly refined over the years, delicately and sensitively fusing science and form. His contribution to the development of conceptual art, particularly in Cuba, is firmly cemented Pérez Monzón as a key figure in the history and evolution of Latin American art.
One of the most enigmatic Cuban artists of the late XNUMXth century, Gustavo Pérez Monzón belongs to a generation of artists that introduced significant changes in Cuban visual art, both formally and conceptually.
He worked with a group loosely known as Volumen Uno, whose 1981 exhibition is considered a watershed in the history of Cuban art. The influences on his work range from the avant-garde experimentation of Latin American artists; the spirituality of abstract expressionist painters; the processes of the Arte Povera movement; and the sculptors of land and land art in the late 60s and early 70s; as well as the writings of Carlos Castaneda. In the late 80s, Pérez Monzón gave up painting entirely and moved to Mexico permanently to focus his attention on art education, working on his practice only intermittently over the years.
Pérez Monzón represented Cuba at the Paris Biennale in 1982 and his work appeared in the first Havana Biennale in 1984 and again in 2015 with the major Tramas retrospective at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de La Habana. The exhibition was organized by Ella Fontanals' Cisneros Collection following the rediscovery of her works by the great Cuban collector, subsequently traveling for the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation (CIFO) in Miami, Florida, USA (2015-2016). Her work was recently the subject of the WEFTS solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Morelense, Cuernavaca, Morelos, Mexico (2018), where the artist currently lives and works.
