# Sculptor Osneldo García, National Prize for Plastic Arts 2003, Passed Away

**Date:** 02/27/2022

Sculptor Osneldo García, who received the National Prize for Plastic Arts 2003 for his life's work, passed away in Havana at the age of 90 on the night of Friday, March 25.

With a creative vocation defined early on, Osneldo began in carving and model-making during his rural childhood in Mayajigua, in the vicinity of Yaguajay, in the northeast of the former province of Las Villas.

Upon moving to the capital, the young man made his living by creating ornamental plaster figures and reproductions of virgins, images of saints and cherubs, and thus managed to pay for his tuition and graduate in drawing and sculpture from the San Alejandro Academy, where he met Camilo Cienfuegos. During that period he returned again and again to his place of origin.

Like many of his contemporaries, he felt the need to transform the suffocating political and social situation that prevailed following the 1952 coup d'état. Thus he was active in the July 26 Movement, was its highest-ranking official in Mayajigua and joined the Northern Front of Las Villas, and later the no. 2 column led by Commander Camilo Cienfuegos.

The Revolution represented for him not only the triumph of the ideals for which he fought but the opportunity to develop his artistic talent to its fullest, as he demonstrated with a solo exhibition at the National Museum of Fine Arts.

In 1962 he traveled to the German Democratic Republic to complete his academic training. The result of the qualitative leap was shown in successive exhibitions in the mid-1960s in several Eastern European countries and in the one he displayed in 1968 at Galería Habana.

Osneldo was in every sense ahead of his time. His works have participated in numerous exhibitions throughout all these years.

This latter venue witnessed in 1977 one of the defining moments in Osneldo's trajectory: his foray into kinetic art, in which he stood out for his pioneering work. On a public scale, two of his most emblematic works in that field are located in the gardens of the National Theater and the Ernesto Che Guevara Palace of Pioneers.

Regarding his work, poet, artist and critic Pedro de Oraá expressed: "In the animation of matter, Osneldo has resolved his particular interpretation of the contingencies and obsessions of the spirit of the era.