Esterio Segura

Art Brokerage: Esterio Segura Cuban Artist: b. 1970. Cuban-born artist, Esterio Segura is a 1994 graduate of the prestigious Instituto Superior de Arte in Havana. Working in painting, sculpture and installation, Segura makes use of humorous imagery to address socially and politically charged themes from Cuban history. He has been exhibited extensively in Cuba, US, Germany, Spain, England, Argentina, Brazil and elsewhere in the world. Segura's work embodies a promiscuous exchange between the symbols of religion and politics, a periodic questioning of national history as selective myth, and the recycling of elements taken from art history all encompassed by a powerful, carnival style that threatens to fuse all hierarchies and protocols. Santo de paseo por el trópico (Saint Touring the Tropics, 1991) is not a preliminary study for the final sculpture of the same name created that year, but one of many drawings that Segura completed as parallels to the sculpture project. His mastery of spectacle, his sensual rendering of the body, and the subtlety of his descriptive line evoke the rites of traditional aesthetic contemplation, in this case indebted to the imagery of the counter-Reformation, to Caravaggio, and to the Baroque sculptors of the Spanish Golden Age.