Collection: Luciano Méndez
Conceived over the course of two decades, the Luciano Méndez Contemporary Cuban Art Collection has become a recognized reference both within Cuba and abroad. Its value lies not only in the breadth of works and artists it gathers, but in the curatorial gaze that brings them together.
Today, with more than 800 works by over 60 artists, the collection offers a diverse map of the concerns, obsessions, and poetic gestures that define visual production in Cuba. It spans from the 1970s to the present day and encompasses painting, sculpture, photography, video art, video installation, and other media, consolidating itself as a plural and representative archive that also sheds light on key moments in the historiography of Cuban art.
The thematic lines explored by the collection make it possible to identify some of the persistent conceptual nuclei within the island’s creative panorama. Identity and memory, explorations of religiosity, the tensions between heritage and modernity, and the use of humor and satire as critical tools coexist with reflections on migration and diaspora, the insular condition, the dynamics of landscape and territory, corporeal inquiries, and investigations into abstraction and metaphysics.
The catalogue includes works by renowned figures such as Manuel Mendive, Roberto Fabelo, Tomás Sánchez, Alfredo Sosabravo, Pedro Pablo Oliva, Moisés Finalé, and José Bedia, alongside mid-career artists and emerging voices like Alejandro Gómez Cangas, Yasiel Elizagaray, Daniela Águila, Douglas Pérez Castro, Luis Enrique Camejo, William Acosta, José Manuel Fors, among others.
The collection has been featured in more than twenty exhibitions, both in Cuba and internationally. Each exhibition has also served as an opportunity to foster study and reflection on the paths that Cuban art has taken and continues to forge. Because this is not merely a private collection: it is a living, evolving project that understands art as both testimony and an essential language for narrating the nuances and contradictions of its time.
