Jose Mijares

Art Brokerage: Jose Mijares Cuban Artist: b. 1921-2004. In 1942 this Cuban artist was admitted to San Alejandro Academy of Fine Arts, Havana. After finishing his academic studies and with a solid professional formation, his instinct led him to search for more contemporary artistic information sources, finding them at the United States and Mexico. He received the National Painting Prize from the IV National Paintings, Engravings and Sculptures Salon, an event that was an important milestone on his career. In his paintings, constructivism and biomorphic surrealism are fused with baroque elements derived from colonial Caribbean design in a mixture of influences that also preoccupied many other Cuban artists between 1940 and 1970, including Amelia Pelaez, Cundo Bermudez, Mario Carreno, Rene Portocarrero and Jorge Camacho. Mijares’s organic abstractions of the 1970s and 1980s are reminiscent of similar work by Wilfredo Lam and Ives Tanguy, and he retained his fascination of the 1950s for geometric forms and his dependency on line to represent form, as in high priestesses of illusion (1971, New York, citas found). The intense blues and greens of the paintings that he called vitrales allude to colonial stained-glass windows. He participated in the biennials at Sao Paolo in 1953 and Venice in 1956. Listings wanted by Art Brokerage.