Carolina Sardi is an Argentinean sculptor established in Miami since 1995. She earned her Master Degree in Sculpture at the National University of La Plata, Argentina. She also studied Architecture and Urbanism at the same University and Sculpture with the artist Enio Iommi.

Some of her solo exhibitions include: Panamerican Art Projects Gallery in Miami and Dallas, Lelia Mordoch Gallery in Paris, Cheryl Hazan Gallery in New York; Steps Gallery in London, UK; Heriard Cimino Gallery in New Orleans, Exquisite Tension at the Gulf Coast Museum of Art in Largo, FL; Blue at the Government Center Gallery from Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs; Over/Under at Flashpoint Gallery in Washington DC; Forest at the Bass Museum of Art in Miami Beach, Bee at Mia Gallery, Miami International Airport ; Imaginary Lines at the Museum of the Americas in Washington DC and Free to be Captive at the Museum of Art of Fort Lauderdale.

She has a broad experience in designing, fabricating and installing public, private and corporate art projects. Some examples of commissioned works include Miami-Dade Art in Public Places, Port of Miami, Baggage Claim, Terminals 4 and 5, Water and Suitcase Projects (2003); Oppenheim Architecture, Ilona Building Fence and Gate, Miami Beach (2001); Related Group of Florida, Icon Building Miami Beach Lobby’s Sculptures and The Slade Palm Beach Suspended Sculpture (2004-2005); Grand Venetian Miami Beach Lobby’s Wall Sculpture and Epic Hotel Miami Wall Sculpture for the Front Desk (2011); Gates, Fence, Louvers and Lamps for the Apogee Beach Building in Hollywood, FL (2014); Icon Bay Fence for Sculpture Park (2015) in Miami for the Related Group of Florida; Wall Installations for the lobby at the Belfiore Building in Houston, TX ( 2016) and Wall Installations for the Cleveland Clinic in Cleveland, OH (2017).

Raul Diaz was born in 1952 in Cordoba, Argentina, where he continues to live and produce his art. Although Diaz studied architecture, he could not avoid the overwhelming call within himself to be a painter. Self-taught as such, he has emerged as one of the most prominent artists in Argentina.

Ernesto Estevez was born in 1967 in Havana, where he currently lives and works. He is a self-taught artist.His works have been part of many exhibitions that celebrate the landscape genre. Among those we can mention the First National Salon of Landscape VICTOR MANUEL, in Havana, Cuba; El paisaje nunca es el mismo. Galería Orígenes, Havana, Cuba; Nuevos horizontes, Museo Cultural de Artes Gráficas, DF. Mexico; and Pintura Latino Americana de Ahora Exhibition. Naples Museum of Art, Naples, Florida. He has been represented at several art fairs such as ARCO, Madrid, Spain; Arte Américas. Miami Beach, Florida; and Pinta, New York.

Influenced by his experience and his contact with nature as a photographer, Estevez decided to paint. He is part of a group of landscape artists whose roots can be traced to artists that came to Cuba, particularly those who came during the XIX Century such as Henri Cleenewerck, Esteban Chartrand and Federico Mialhe among others. Their admiration for the Cuban landscape served as inspiration for a vast body of work. Estevez takes from these artists their main theme and also formal aspects such as palette and compositions. However, he achieves a very personal way of portraying the Cuban landscape through his unique paintings.

Currently lives and works in Havana, Cuba

Ernesto Estevez Garcia (b. 1967, Havana, Cuba)
Lives and works in Havana, Cuba

Education:
Self-taught

Selected Solo Exhibitions:
2008 El corazón con que vivo. Pan American Art Projects, Miami, Florida
2002 Metáforas del Paisaje. La Acacia Gallery, Havana, Cuba

Selected Group Exhibitions:
2011 Arteamericas. Miami Beach Convention Centre, Miami Beach, Florida

2010 Encuentros Hispano-Cubano de Arte contemporáneo. Sala Retiro, Madrid, Spain
Arte Américas. Miami Beach, Florida, USA.

2009 Pintura Latino Americana de Ahora Exhibition. Naples Museum of Art, Naples, Florida
Expo colateral a la X Bienal de la Habana. Galería Habana, Havana, Cuba
El silencio del paisaje. Edificio del conde de Lombillo, Havana, Cuba
El paisaje nunca es el mismo. Galería Orígenes, Havana, Cuba
Nuevos horizontes. Museo Cultural de Artes Graficas, DF. Mexico

Accomplished painter, sculptor, and draftsman Julio Larraz through his artwork has transcended time and place for more than 50 years to become one of the most influential figures in Latin American and American art. Born in Havana, Cuba in 1944, Larraz is both a Cuban artist and an American artist. His foundation and love for art began to form during his youth and blossomed into an abundant career.

Julio Larraz’s father was a political activist and student who was imprisoned by the Machado regime for three years at the Isle of Pines. When he was released, he would go on to become the owner and editor of a newspaper in Havana, “La Discusion”. Larraz’s mother was a law student who later became the director of the family’s newspaper. In 1959, when Fidel Castro’s regime took control of Cuba, free press was extinguished immediately. With this new change the family realized that they would have to seek asylum in the United States; Julio Larraz was 16 years old.

The experience of being forced into exile and leaving his childhood home in Cuba had a profound effect on Larraz’s life and art. Before his physical exile, Larraz experienced some internal exile as well. As a child, Larraz spent most of his classroom hours perfecting his talents as an artist rather than attending to his schoolwork. He used school as a life drawing class in which he practiced his technique by creating caricatures and cartoons of teachers. Eternally energetic and full of imaginative impulsivity, he was expelled from several schools eventually landing in a military academy run by ex-officers of Fulgencio Batista. The combination of this ex-politically affiliated academy, followed by his eventual exile from Cuba, led to the development and motivation of Larraz’s caricatures. When asked of this introduction he said they “came naturally. [They were] natural, critical observations.” What he describes as more of a feeling than an observation, his caricatures grew in popularity due to their sense of humor, ability to portray each individual personality, and the skilled quality of his work.

Soon after arriving in the United States, he began to draw political caricatures that were published by the New York Times, The Washington Post, Vogue, Rolling Stone, Time, Ramparts, Newsweek, and The Chicago Tribune. The politics which forced him out of the country he loved would in turn carve and model the political undertones of his work. Aside from his well-placed caricatures, attributes such as the sea, imagery of people, faces, and locations have all weaved themselves into his work. He honed and sharpened his technique and the subjects of his work were influenced by the animosity he felt through the challenges and exploits he faced as a growing member of society. Through this journey, Larraz emerged as one of the world’s great painters.

Larraz was recognized professionally as a painter in 1971 with his first solo exhibition at the Pyramid Gallery in Washington, D.C. His work has since shown in galleries throughout the United States, Europe and South America. Larraz’s work has also been represented in numerous group exhibitions and can be found in many public and private collections. He has been the recipient of several awards from the Center for the Arts and Education, New York, NY; FACE, Miami, FL; the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the National Institute of Arts and Letters, New York, NY; and the Instituto de Educación Internacional, New York, NY. His omnivorous dedication to his craft has resulted in an enormous body of work spanning six decades, created in different mediums, and most importantly, contributing to the integration of Latin-American art culture.

In the 1980s, Larraz began experimenting with sculpture, a medium he took to almost immediately. Although he is not always remembered for his migration into the form of sculpture, he has created well known pieces which have graced public spaces, art galleries, and art fairs for years.

Since leaving Cuba, Larraz has lived and worked primarily in the United States, yet the time he has spent traveling has proven to be some of his most prolific. While living in Italy in the late 90s to early 2000s, he created countless watercolors that have added immense volumes to his collection. Larraz spent time living in New Mexico and Paris as well. These cities, landscapes and cultures also influenced and deepened his work, adding to the images he draws upon from within his deep imagination.

The development of Larraz’s work is based on many studies which he then builds into larger works. He borrows the appearance and expressions of people he encounters in his daily life and his travels and these faces often come to life in his work as characters from other worlds, other places, and other times. Larraz refers to this collection of ideas in his imagination as “The Kingdom We Carry Inside”. He speaks of his visions as dreams and describes being forced to do fast sketches in an attempt to capture them before they disappear. “They are like dreams, it’s like when you try to tell someone about a dream you had, and it becomes smoke before you finish the sentence”.

Larraz’s work combines the refinement of a skilled draftsman, and the narratives of a born storyteller, with the surreal distortion of a magician.

In 2004 Julio Larraz returned to Miami where he lives and works today.

Sam Francis (1923 - 1994) occupies a prominent position in post-war American painting. Although associated with the Abstract Expressionist movement and Clement Greenberg's Post-Painterly Abstraction, unlike many American painters of the time he had direct and prolonged exposure to French painting and to Japanese art which had an individual impact on his work.

On leaving the U.S. Army Air Corps in 1944 owing to illness Francis took up painting as a hobby. He decided to make this a serious undertaking studying under David Park in 1947 and completed his BA and MA at the University of California. He was greatly influenced by Abstract Expressionism, particularly the works of Clyfford Still and Jackson Pollock. In his use of space on the canvas to allow free circulation of strong color and the sensitivity to light, Francis developed his own style by the time his studies had ended.

Francis moved to Paris in 1950 where he met Jean-Paul Riopelle who was to remain an important influence, and study of Monet's Waterlilies had a profound impact on his work. From a very muted palette of grays and whites he returned to the qualities of light and color producing such works as Big Red 1953. He continues to develop the use of white space and increased the dimensions of his paintings for greater emphasis. During his period in Europe he executed a number of monumental mural paintings.

Francis returned to California in 1962 and was then influenced by the West Coast School's preoccupation with mysticism and Eastern philosophy. Blue had become a more dominant feature of his work since 1959 inspired by personal suffering and the great joy of becoming a father for the first time in 1961. This led to combinations of hard color and more disciplined structures with centrally placed rectangles during the 1970s. Eventually these more rigid structures gave way to looser configurations sometimes of snake-like forms with web-like patterns. Blue, sometimes brilliant, remained an important part of many later works.

Abstract painter Mark Tobey strived to represent the mystical through art. Inspired by international travels, Eastern religion, Arabic calligraphy, classical music, and the emerging modes of Abstract Expressionism, Tobey created a unique visual language of all-over painting and gestural abstraction, which he called “white writing.” “What I had learned in the Orient had affected more than I realized,” he said. “In a short time white writing emerged. I had a totally new conception of painting.” When working in this technique, Tobey would place white calligraphic marks and symbols atop an abstract field composed of thousands of densely interwoven brushstrokes.

León Ferrari’s subversive practice spanned sculpture, painting, drawing, assemblage, film, collage, mail art, poetry, and sound. Originally trained as an electrical engineer, Ferrari began making sculptures while in Italy for his daughter’s hospital treatments, and his studio practice quickly expanded. Investigations into language are central to Ferrari’s work; his drawings, sculptures, and collages often incorporate text and calligraphic patterns in order to consider power dynamics and social hierarchies related to religion and the state. His painting Last Judgement (1985) and toaster sculpture Torradeira (2000) offer more explicit, wry critiques of Catholicism as they re contextualize iconic religious imagery. The pope himself has condemned Ferrari’s provocations. The artist won a Golden Lion at the 2007 Venice Biennale. His work has sold for six figures at auction and belongs in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Museo Reina Sofía, the Centre Pompidou, and the Museu de Arte Moderna de Rio de Janeiro, among others.

Miami-based contemporary visual artist Leticia Sánchez Toledo was born in 1985 and is of Cuban and Spanish descent. She is well-known for her personal depictions of women and scenes of them that are influenced by her passion in movies, where color and light play key roles in evoking a painting’s aura or atmosphere.

She spent her childhood learning about the world through the big screen at the nearby movie theater where she lived in a little town. Today Leticia offers a personal view of her wishes and concerns while also examining social, cultural, and ethnic issues that are present in the lives of women today. She does this as a mental challenge and by using frames to communicate her own point of view in the social space.

My work is focused, especially, around a deep love for painting. Painting is for me, a way of expression, my language and discourse. I build a personal universe in my work that results from my thoughts, aspirations, fantasies and also, of course, from direct dialogue with my circumstances.

I am greatly interested in the reconstruction of animals, objects and organic forms. These elements, in a symbolic way, establish a common thread that connects all my works in the same horizon, stimulating winks, associations and complicity between some pieces and others. I am very interested in the narrative sense of the work and its (metaphorical) correlations with life itself. For me, painting is a state of emotion, a state of consciousness, a way, if you will, of saying things. I like that the pictorial work, the pictorial material, in their full realization and expansion, speak for themselves: that they themselves be capable of narrating their story, of revealing the reasons —intellectual or emotional— that push them to exist as verifiable facts, as a tangible reality.

The theatrical and scenographic dimensions interest me profoundly. It is from that place that the work itself seems to be the “metaphoric illustration" of a tale, or reality itself, passed through the sieve of my subjectivity. Despite the substantial differences between one work and another, like in a dramaturgical text a close relationship is woven between all of them that speaks all the time of the landscape, of fiction, of the juxtaposition of elements —as in a collage— and of the inescapably human need to try to understand the contrasting and fascinating realities of this world, my world.