Agustín Drake Aldama

Distinguished sculptor with an extensive body of work recognized throughout the country and abroad. He has participated in more than 80 collective exhibitions and numerous solo exhibitions.

UNESCO Prize at the VI FIART 1997, nominated for the National Prize for Plastic Arts 1999. He belongs to the Provincial Center of Plastic Arts. He began his artistic life in 1953 and entered the field in 1959. He holds the Alejo Carpentier Medal, the Distinction for Cuban Culture, the Raúl Gómez García Distinction, and is part of National Vanguard.

He has more than twenty recognitions for his artistic and teaching work; scattered throughout Cuba is a rosary of environmental sculptures bearing his signature and he is a reference point for metalwork in the country.

Agustín Drake has shaped an unusual population of metallic beings. Birds, arthropods, monsters taken from medieval imagination, strange war machines and bellicose angels... nothing here has been created from pure matter, but rather from the most diverse objects assembled by the fire of that production instrument that artists have taken from factories to put at the service of modern sculpture.

Drake's animals belong to a heraldic fauna. There is no desire to create beings that run, sleep, suffer, desire or attack, vibrant with life, but rather to present an emblematic wardrobe that merely displays their attributes. They are not typical dreamlike beings extracted from the subconscious, nor entities of nightmares and mystery.

His Zoo is inscribed in the great tradition of hieratic and fantastic animalism that begins with Paleolithic painting from Franco-Cantabria, primitive totems and ancient Eastern art. It is curious to note Drake as someone who in the full twentieth century, using articles of industrial production assembled by means of a technological tool, repeats a method of conceiving fabulous creatures that date back to prehistory. Drake is thus a present-day descendant of the representers of myths of most illustrious lineage. He is inspired by a fantastic fable <> (in the same sense one speaks of dead languages), that has only survived on the artistic plane. His creatures possess a single <> power, still essential in our technological era, the faculty of moving the imagination.

Personal Exhibitions
Among his most relevant personal exhibitions are:
1971 Exhibition of his work at the Art Gallery of Matanzas, Cuba.
1981 Anasy Antananarivo, Madagascar.
1981 Exhibition at the National Museum of Art, Maputo, Mozambique.

Collective Exhibitions
In the years 1954, 1955, 1956, 1959 and 1964 he exhibits in collective shows at the National Museum of Fine Arts. In 1976 at the Museum of Modern Art "La Tertulia", Cali, Colombia and in 1989 at the Art Center "Il Meloziano", Genoa, Italy.

Awards
National Salon of Painting, Sculpture and Engraving. 1976.
V Provincial Salon of Plastic Arts, Art Gallery, Matanzas. 1983.
Small Format Sculpture Symposium. 1986.
Salon Art is a Weapon of the Revolution. 1991.
FIART/93 1993.
FIART/97 1997.
Individual Work Prize.
UNESCO Prize 1997.