Rafael Soriano, Large Cuban Master Lithograph Abstract Biomorphic Serigraph Print Rafael Soriano, c.1990

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Rafael Soriano (1920 - 2015) Hand signed lower right Numbered lower left 130/150 Born in 1920 in the town of … Read more Rafael Soriano (1920 - 2015) Hand signed lower right Numbered lower left 130/150 Born in 1920 in the town of Cidra in the province of Matanzas, Rafael Soriano manifested an early inclination for painting. After completing seven years of study at Havana’s prestigious Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes San Alejandro, he graduated in 1941 as Professor of Painting, Drawing and Sculpture. He then returned to Matanzas where he taught visual arts for close to two decades. He was a co-founder, and later Director, of the Escuela de Bellas Artes de Matanzas, the most important art school in Cuba outside of Havana. He was one of the major Latin American artists of his generation and one of the premier painters of Cuba. In 1962 Soriano went into exile, settling in Miami with his wife Milagros and his daughter Hortensia. He worked as a graphic designer and occasionally taught, first at the Catholic Welfare Bureau, and later at the Cuban Cultural Program of the University of Miami. He continued to paint tirelessly in the evenings. Soriano avoided vernacular themes which dominated Cuban art from its emergence with the first Vanguard in the mid-twenties. His work proceeded along the paths of geometric abstraction in the course of 1950’s, and was a part of the Ten Concrete Geometric painters, (Los Diez Pintores Concretos, The group were inspired by many European artists, and gathered at Galeria Color-Luz (Color-Light), opened by Lolo Soldevilla who had spent several years in Paris as Cuba’s cultural attaché, her partner was Pedro de Oraa, an artist, poet and art critic. Wifredo Arcay worked as a printmaker in Paris in the early 1950s and met many contemporary artists there. Sandu Darie, was a Romanian who emigrated to the island in 1941. The development of Cuban geometric abstraction oil painting, the formation of Los Diez, coincided with the radical political and cultural shifts that raged throughout the country in the 1950s. The concept of concrete art quickly spread and many new groups were formed in Paris (Art Concret and Abstraction-Création) and Latin America (Madi, in Buenos Aires, Grupo Frente in Rio de Janeiro). Mario Carreño, Luis Martínez Pedro Jose Mijares, Alberto Menocal, Pedro Alvarez,Salvador Corratge, Pedro de Oraa, Jose Angel Rosabal, and Rafael Soriano. By the late 1960’s, Soriano’s work took a radical turn. His brush began to create amazing shapes; abstract expressions related to the emotions, feelings, meditations and mystical introspections. A novel treatment of light and color, transparencies and forms placed Soriano in a new aesthetic dimension and freed him from his earlier attachments to schools and tendencies. He worked in a pastel style. Of the generation of Cuban Masters Wifredo Lam, Agustin Cardenas, Manuel Mendive, Sandu Darie, Agustin Fernandez, Jose Mijares, Amelia Pelaez, Mariano Rodriguez. Since his first solo exhibition in 1947 in Havana’s Lyceum and Lawn Tennis Club, Raphael Soriano’s work has been represented in numerous individual exhibitions and over 200 collective shows. He has had shoes at Hollis Taggart and at LnS art in Miami where he was shown with Artists Arturo Rodríguez, Carlos Alfonzo, César Trasobares, Emilio Sanchez, Fernando Garcia, Florencio Gelabert, Gustavo Acosta Lolo Soldevilla, Mario Díaz Bencomo, Roberto Matta, Tomas Sanchez and Tony Vazquez-Figueroa. His paintings have traveled through the United States, Latin America & Europe. His work is included in numerous private and public collections: Art Museum of the Americas, Washington, D.C., Bacardi Corporate Collection, Miami, Fla., Banco Bozano-Simonsen, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Blanton Museum of Art, Denver Art Museum, Galería de Arte Moderno, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, Long Beach Museum of Art, California, Lowe Art Museum, Miami, Fla., McMullen Museum of Art at Boston College, Mass., Museo de Arte Zea, Medellin, Colombia, Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de La Habana, Cuba, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., NSU Art Museum, Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., , Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum, Pérez Art Museum Miami, Fla., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C., Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, N.Y., Zimmerli Art Museum and other important institutions and corporations. See less