Retrospect and Restoration: Paintings by Humberto Calzada
/January 15 – March 26, 2011
Dorothy Jenkins Gallery
Exhibition Reception: Friday, January 14, 6:00 – 8:30pm. FREE for Members, $10 Non-Members.
Humberto Calzada is a leading figure from the first generation of exiled artists to have developed outside of Cuba. He introduces historically charged imagery into a modernist pictorial tradition. His paintings of architectural scenes are based on observations and memories of Cuba. He combines the scientific approach of Renaissance perspective with the state of uncertainty of de Chirico’s piazzas and the experience of 20th-century abstraction with nostalgic sentimentality.
Humberto Calzada was born in Cuba in 1944 and has lived in the United States since 1960. In 1966 he received a degree in Industrial Engineering, followed by a MBA in Finance (1968) from the University of Miami. He began painting in 1972 and since 1976 has dedicated his time exclusively to painting. His work has been said to carry on the classical Latin American artistic tradition: dreamlike realism, tension created by the contrast between calm and conflict, and the use of timeless symbols as a universal language.
Throughout his career, he has applied these themes using architectural imagery. He depicts harmony through the use of natural elements, and he depicts conflict through the opposition of the ephemeral movement of light and water against the static force of stone and glass.
Exhibition Sponsors:
Mr. and Mrs. Andy Hernandez
Dr. and Mrs. Emilio Montero
Annual Exhibition Fund Sponsors:
- Cowles Charitable Trust
- Dorothy Chao Jenkins
- The Reitzel Foundation
- The Hazelle Paxson Morrison Foundation
- Mrs. George W. Truitt
- BCI Engineers & Scientists