GUSTAVO ACOSTA (b. 1958)

An accomplished draftsman, Acosta has long portrayed urban landscapes, probing architectural details with painstaking and dramatic impasto. He received the National Prize for Drawing at the first Havana Biennial (1984) and came of age as part of the generation of Cuban artists who emerged in the 1980s. Acosta left Havana in 1991, briefly for Mexico and then for Spain—where the present work was painted—before settling in Miami in 1994. “Acosta has always searched the walls of urban landscapes,” observes Adriana Herrera, “looking into their architectonic traditions for spaces in which to follow not only traces of collective wounds—like the red marks that appeared on the old buildings of Havana, which the artist recreated in gray while living in Barcelona, his first city of exile—but also the nontransferable effect of each city” (“Carlos Estévez and Gustavo Acosta, Art Nexus 70, September-December 2008, p. 144).
Time and space are inscribed onto the present canvas: the year hovers atop the image, and the five Olympic rings—symbols of transcontinental unity—appear beneath his signature on the verso, placing it in Barcelona. “Mil novecientos noventa y dos is a good example of a period when he included circular buildings in his works,” explains curator Irina Levya-Pérez. “He used as a model the Presidio Modelo de Isla de Pinos, an unusual prison building in Cuba, very peculiar and easily recognizable from its atypical geometric shape. The historic connotation of this particular building is a post-revolutionary one, since it was the prison where Castro was held in the fifties; it later became a museum” (“Revisiting the Past: The Paintings of Gustavo Acosta,” ARTPULSE, January 2011).
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park