HUMBERTO CALZADA: A THIRTY YEAR RETROSPECTIVE At The LOWE ART MUSEUM

Wednesday, 01 November 2006 08:42

Coral Gables - Humberto Calzada: In Dreams Awake will be on view at the Lowe Art Museum, University of Miami, Coral Gables, from December 1, 2006 through January 28, 2007.  The exhibition celebrates thirty-years of professional career and features seventy-one works borrowed from public and private collections.  Calzada uses the universal languages of architecture and nature to explore the intimacy of memory, fear, and longing.  His work, based on Cuban colonial and neo-classic architecture, is easy to recognize, but difficult to define.  Studies in contradiction, his images are part-realistic, part-surreal, modern yet classical, restful yet unsettling, misleadingly simple, but rich in symbolism.  All are uniquely personal.

Curator Jesus Rosado, formerly of Havana, Cuba’s National Museum of Beaux Arts (Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes), considers Calzada the “architect of the exile community’s visual Cuba.”  In his article, “Humberto Calzada: The Poetics of a Motionless Time” he writes:

“His strategy is to capture time, rendering it still and motionless in his imagery.  It is a kind of archeological exploration of the senses which the artist skillfully conducts with every stroke of the brush.  There is an effort to rescue periods of life that are clearly missing, not just to bear witness about what has been experienced, but to make possible the coexistence of the past with the present. This is a persistent code in the work of Calzada, one that grants meaning throughout three decades of artistic pilgrimage wherein time has been seized and beloved walls reproduced, resulting in a poetic framework.”

Humberto Calzada was born in 1944 in Havana, Cuba and has resided in Miami since 1960.  He is a University if Miami alumnus, having earned degrees Industrial Engineering (1966) and an MBA in Finance (1968).  He became a professional artist in 1976, following his first exhibition at Bacardi Gallery in 1975.  He describes the subject of his paintings as being spaces “that might never exist physically, but which are as real to me as the soil on which my soul is now planted, and the soil on which my heart still walks.”

Concurrent with the exhibition, a 252 page book will be published containing an Introduction by Brian Dursum, Director of the Lowe Museum, an Introduction by Carlos Alberto Montaner, and essays by Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, Ileana Fuentes, Carol Damian, Enrico Mario Santí, and Jesus Rosado, the exhibition’s Curator.  The 252-page hardcover book contains over 200 color illustrations of work ranging from 1973 to 2006.

The Lowe Art Museum is located at the University of Miami at 1301 Stanford Drive, Coral Gables.  Visit : www.lowemuseum.org.