Umberto Peña

Draughtsman, engraver, painter, graphic designer – his are the iconic covers of "La Casa de las Américas"

He studied at the National Academy of Fine Arts San Alejandro (1954-1958), although he did not complete them. He shared with students who would later become undisputed figures in Cuban visual arts, such as Antonia Eiriz, José Ángel Acosta León and Miguel Collazo. In 1959 he joined the Association of Engravers of Cuba. The following year he obtained a scholarship in Mexico to study at the Higher Polytechnic Institute.

Later he traveled to Vigo (Spain) and Paris. In 1959 he exhibited his first works in Cuba (National Salon) and in Mexico (Center for Contemporary Art).

In 1961 he began working as a designer in the Propaganda Department of the National Council of Culture, while at the same time doing work for the Cuban National Commission of UNESCO.

In July 1964 he held his first solo exhibition at the Association of Engravers of Cuba, under the title of 12 Lithographs. In September that exhibition was taken to Prague, where it was displayed at the Cuban House of Culture. Likewise in the following years, his works were part of collective exhibitions presented in Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, the Soviet Union, Poland, England, Canada, Italy, Japan and Sweden.

He began as an engraver in the Experimental Workshop of Havana, where he created his first pieces. In 1964 he received his first important recognition. A set of his engravings was awarded the Lithography Prize at the Havana Exhibition, organized by La Casa de las Américas. The jury was made up of Manuel Moreno Galván (Spain), Antonio Seguí (Argentina), Raquel Tibol (Mexico) and Tomás Oliva (Cuba).

In 1967 Peña was selected among painters under thirty-five years old to represent Cuba at the V Biennale de la Jeune Peinture in France. There he obtained one of the six prizes that were awarded. As part of the grant corresponding to the award, the following year he went to Paris for six months. During his stay, he dedicated himself to traveling, viewing painting and establishing contacts with galleries and artists such as Antonio Saura, Rómulo Macció and Pierre Alechinsky.

Between 1970 and 1971, he created a series of lithographs in which erotic content was accompanied by a nuance full of irony. In these pieces, the sexual organs are independent of the body, to the point that they seem endowed with their own soul and to be possessed by a demon that drives them to defy the space they inhabit.

Suspicious looks and more prudish mentalities were scandalized, and debates arose in the cultural environment. The series contributed to increasing his reputation as an irreverent artist, as well as the aura of taboo that had been forming around his work. The dogmatic policy that began to be applied after the National Congress of Education and Culture of 1971 caused his work as a painter to be condemned to ostracism and his paintings not to be exhibited again until 1988.

Because of this, he stopped engraving and painting and devoted himself entirely to his work as a graphic designer.

Umberto Peña possessed a strident, very strong, brave artistic discourse, full of sex, of force… and yet, his was a personality of wise serenity and tranquility. A character that helped him overcome the ostracism to which he was subjected by Cuban authorities who began to see him as a dissident artist.

His activity in graphic design truly began in 1963, when he started working at La Casa de las Américas. In 1965 he redesigned the collections already in existence (Prize, Latin American Literature, Casa Notebooks, Our Countries), as well as that of the Casa de las Américas magazine.

The vast Hall of Lost Steps of the National Capitol housed in November 1980 the exhibition Trapices. It was the first solo exhibition he had done since the 1960s. Trapices was created in tribute to the VII International Ballet Festival and was given sound by Juan Blanco, and was praised by several critics. That experience also awakened in Peña an interest in textile experimentation. This led him to participate, between 1983 and 1991, in the Telarte project, which sought to link visual artists to the design of textile prints for Light Industry. In June of that year, the National Museum of Fine Arts inaugurated the exhibition Painting/Engraving/Drawing/Textile/Graphic Design (in which works prior to 1963 were excluded). With that his career received the recognition that is usually given to masters and established artists.

After leaving La Casa de las Américas, Peña dedicated himself to working as a freelancer. At the end of 1992 he traveled to Mexico for a month, and returned in January 1993, on that occasion to teach for six months a course at the University of Xochimilco. After completing it, he went to the United States, where he resided for about twelve years. In that country he devoted himself fundamentally to working as a designer. A good part of that activity was linked to Término Editorial, whose books he designed and laid out.

Exile in Miami was always very difficult for his sensibility and in 2006 he settled in Salamanca where he continued painting, living in the serenity of the lettered city that never fully understood that within its walls lived an artist of worldwide importance who had arrived from Cuba, walking its center with measured step.

In 2012 he held his first solo exhibition since 1988: About Salamanca. Recent Paintings and Drawings. Part of it could later be seen at the Club Diario de Ibiza Gallery. In these pieces he maintains the figurative expressionism of his previous visual work, now with a more dreamlike and surrealist character.

In February 2011, the Building of Cuban Art of the National Museum of Fine Arts of Havana (Cuba) presented the exhibition Two Erotic Impulses, made up of works by him and Santiago Armada. In January 2013, La Casa de las Américas programmed an exhibition of his work.

Influences
The works of Mexican muralists have manifested themselves in Peña's work through a certain gigantism that his painting had, from his experiences in Mexico. His critics have also recognized the influence of Francis Bacon.

Solo Exhibitions
1964: 12 Lithographs. Association of Engravers of Cuba, Havana, Cuba; Cuban House of Culture, Prague, Czechoslovakia.
1965: Lithographs, Drawings. Gallery of Havana, Havana.
1967: Lithographs. University Art Gallery, Aula Magna, Central University, Caracas, Venezuela.
1968: 3 Cubans: Llinás-Peña-Zapata. Vanadis Gallery, Stockholm, Sweden.
1970: Lithographs from Cuba. Umberto Peña, Alfredo Sosabravo. Zentrifuge Gallery, Berlin, Federal Republic of Germany.
1971: Exhibition of Engravings. Doctor Glas Gallery, Stockholm, Sweden.
1980: Trapices. Hall of Lost Steps, Academy of Sciences of Cuba, National Capitol, Havana.
1988: Painting. Engraving. Drawing. Textile. Graphic Design. National Museum of Fine Arts, Havana.
2010: Two Impulses of the Erotic. Santiago Armada and Umberto Peña. National Museum of Fine Arts, Havana, Cuba.
2012: Paintings. Cultural Center Caja España-Duero Salamanca, Spain.
2012: Paintings and Drawing. Club Diario de Ibiza Gallery, Spain.
2013: Umberto Peña: Return of a Visceral Painter. Latin American Gallery, La Casa de las Américas, Havana.
Collective Exhibitions
1968: Cuban Painting Today. Istituto Italo-Latinoamericano, Piazza Marconi, Rome, Italy.
1972: Engravings of 16 painters from Latin America. Galerie Michel Cassé, Paris, France.
1983: Cuban Poster Art. A Retrospective 1961-1982. Westbeth Gallery, New York, United States.