The Miami Museum Park today hosts eight large figurative sculptures by the renowned Cuban-American artist Julio Larraz, who considers that he is banned in museums for “not political, but artistic” reasons.
From an exhibition in a public space, “I am interested above all in attracting the attention of children, sowing the seeds of love for art,” says Larraz (Havana, 1944) in a statement to Efe on the occasion of an exhibition organized by the Museum Nader of Latin American Art (NAMLA).
The exhibition in the park is complemented with a sample of the series of busts of emperors created by Larraz that is exhibited in the provisional headquarters of NAMLA, located in the artistic neighborhood of Wynwood.
Gallerist Gary Nader, owner of the important art collection of NAMLA, is the curator of the exhibition, which will remain in the park located on the shores of Bay of Biscay, in downtown Miami, until December 19.
Creator of “sociological and historical allegories” based on the “figurative tradition and its rich imagination”, according to the NAMLA, Larraz presents in this exhibition sculptures of the Ganymede series, The Trojan horse, The monarch, The game of bowling and other of immense fruits, like a slice of watermelon in colored bronze.
Larraz, who has resided in Miami for 30 years, underlined to Efe that in all that time he has not been invited to exhibit at the Miami art museums and he blamed it on the fact that his art is not conceptual.
“I’m on a blacklist not for political reasons but artistic, either you do the concept and you go with the pack or you do not exist anywhere,” he says grateful for this invitation to show his sculptures to the community.
Larraz resides in the USA since 1961. When he arrived in New York at the beginning of the 1960s, he found that all young artists were turning to abstraction and new forms.
He chose to paint human beings, nature and objects as well as some of the masters he most admires, such as Brueghel, Velázquez, Goya and Degás. “Every artist has to rise up,” he stressed in an interview with Efe last year.
