Marta María Pérez Bravo
HAVANA, 1959
Graduated from the Instituto Superior de Arte de La Habana in 1984, specializing in painting. In 1995 he left Cuba and moved with his family to Monterrey (Mexico).
Both his photographic work from the 80’s onwards and his later contributions to video represent a permanent personal approach to popular Cuban cults and concomitant universes such as spiritism. His projects are based on exhaustive bibliographical documentation and direct contact with believers, whose practices, rituals and worldviews he studies meticulously before processing them and using them as materials for the gestation of a work that he approaches as if it were a sacred place. From the incardination between the varied repertoires of religious practices and symbols that surround her and her own experience is born a singular poetics that energizes themes such as the feminine, desire, motherhood, pain, death, play, superstition or ritual. The artist’s body often becomes the compositional axis, summoning the presence of personal elements and emotions in the context of a work whose iconographic and narrative repertoires transcend the individual to open up to a wider horizon of reception.
In 1988 he begins his international career with solo exhibitions at the Museo Carrillo Gil (Mexico); Museo de Arte Contemporáneo (Peru) and Museo de Arte Moderno (Venezuela). In 1989 she represents Cuba in the III Biennial of Havana and in 1990 in the XXI Biennial of Sao Paulo (Brazil). That same year she is invited to be part of the Art and Cuba Now project, Bronx Museum of the Arts (USA).
Marta María Pérez Bravo’s work has been exhibited at the IV Havana Biennial; the V Istanbul Biennial (Turkey) and the Gwangju Biennial (South Korea). She has exhibited in numerous museums, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Museo del Barrio (USA); Museum of Contemporary Art (Australia); Museum Fridericianum (Germany); Muesarnok Museum (Hungary); Museum for Moderne Kunst (Denmark); Museum of Fine Arts (USA); Wichita Art Museum (USA); Museum of Fine Arts (USA); Miami Art Museum (USA) and Los Angeles County Museum of Art (USA) and is part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA, USA); Museum of Fine Arts (USA); Museum of Art (Finland); National Museum of Fine Arts (Cuba); Ludwig Forum (Germany); Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Spain); Museo Español e Iberoamericano de Arte Contemporáneo (Spain) and Norton Collection.