Amelia Pelaez revives among murals and canvases in Cuba

The artist, who died on April 8, 1968, aged 71, bequeathed a vast catalog of canvases, cardboards, ceramics, stained glass, murals, among other pieces, which are among art movements such as cubism, geometric abstraction and surrealism.

Her art alludes from the symbolism to the Cuban identity, for which she deserved the praise of the National Poet, Nicolas Guillen, who said, ‘Amelia is like an underwater world. Amelia is like an underground world. Amelia passes in a great breath, and remains. It remains in a vast breath, the painting spinning.’

Likewise, writer Jose Lezama Lima praised the work of Pelaez who created from ‘a fruit, a cornice, a tablecloth,’ and turned each element into a tribute to tradition, ‘an intelligent voluptuousness that began as a discipline, an asceticism, a spiritual exercise.’

‘Her work over time had become the most fascinating of operas. It was a pool, an aquarium, an immense operatic display, in the center of which events were taking place,’ Lezama Lima noted after Amelia’s death.