Docent
Researcher Sabra Feldstein
Biodata
Date of birth January 13, 1959
Place of birth Havana, Cuba
Current residence Miami, Florida
Education
School of Art of San Alefandro (1976) and the Superior
Institute of Art, Havana (1981) Emigrated to Mexico in 1991, and to the United
States in 1993
Major Shows/Galleries
Selected Individual Exhibitions
1989 - "Final del Centauro" - Castillo de la Real
Fuerza, Havana, Cuba
1994 - "José Bedia: De Donde Vengo" - Institute of
Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania
2004 - "Estremecimientos" - Museo Extremeño e
Iberoamericano de Arte Contemporaneo (MEIAC), Badajoz, Spain
September 18, 2011 - January 8, 2012 - "Transcultural
Pilgrim: Three Decades of Work by José Bedia" - Fowler Museum, UCLA
Collective Exhibitions
In 1980 he conformed the exhibition "XIX Premi
Internacional de Dibuix Joan Miró". Fundació Joan Miró, Centre d’Estudis
d’Art Contemporani, Parc de Montjuic, Barcelona,Spain; "Los novísimos
cubanos. Grupo Volumen I" was a significant exhibition at The Signs
Gallery, New York. He was selected to participate in the Cubans exhibition in
the 1st and 2nd Havana Biennial Bienal de La Habana, Museo Nacional de Bellas
Artes. In 1990 he was in the XLIV Exposizione Internazionale d’Arte. Biennale
di Venezia. Venice, Italy. In 1994, his work was exhibited at "InSite94: A
Binational Exhibition of Installation and Site Specific Art" San Diego
Train Station, San Diego, California. Most recently in 2001 his pieces were
part of "Inside and Out. Contemporary Sculpture, Video and
Installations". Bass Museum of Art, IV Bienal del Caribe y Centroamérica,
Museo de Arte Moderno, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic.
Media : Painter
The earliest art expressed a spiritual communion with
nature, whether capturing animal spirits for the hunt or condensing the
mysteries of reproduction in a fertility icon. Cuban-born Miami-based artist
José Bedia marries this shamanic impulse with the vocabulary of modern abstract
painting in his striking exhibition at Latin American Masters. Applying
expressive paint handling to iconic figures and animals (or hybrids of the
two), he reactivates imagery drawn from Native American and African spiritual
tradition.
Contextual information
José Bedia’s art is as fresh as wet graffiti and as ancient
as cave paintings. The Cuban-born artist resolves the distance of millennia in
spare line drawings rooted at once in an appreciation for comic art and an abiding
belief in the shared characteristics of indigenous faiths. A priest of Palo
Monte, a rural religion closely tied to nature, Bedia has studied with Lakota
Indians, the Yoruba of West Africa and adherents of the pan-Caribbean Santería
religion. From a personal cosmography born of his immersion in diverse
cultures, Bedia’s drawings are populated by godlike animistic figures with
extenuated limbs that reach out over great distances, perhaps alluding to the
artist’s desire to bring diverse cultures into synchronic unison. Sentences
written in elegant script often suggest didactic messages, as in one circular
canvas in which a rabbit-eared figure growing from a mountain holds in its fist
a wide-winged bird straining to reach the horizon. No puedo retenerte más is
the enscribed legend: I can no longer hold you. It is a sentiment familiar to
anyone who has tried in vain to restrain something that must be freed–a child,
a lover, a secret–or conversely felt trapped by loving constraints. Though
accessible on the surface, Bedia’s art inevitably withholds layers that remain
ambiguous. Why are such intimate sentiments set against astrological renderings
of the night sky? Why are offerings left at certain drawings and installations?
Even for the uninitiated, Bedia is a great teacher, using his tremendous
graphic skill to engage viewers in a personal spiritual voyage.
The earliest art expressed a spiritual communion with
nature, whether capturing animal spirits for the hunt or condensing the
mysteries of reproduction in a fertility icon. Cuban-born Miami-based artist
José Bedia marries this shamanic impulse with the vocabulary of modern abstract
painting in his striking exhibition at Latin American Masters. Applying
expressive paint handling to iconic figures and animals (or hybrids of the
two), he reactivates imagery drawn from Native American and African spiritual
traditions.
In “Gente Venado (Deer People),” six ghostly figures with
antlers emerge from a textured gray ground, their bodies little more than
vertical black smudges. Pulsing yellow lines form a polygonal shape around them
that seems to mark a territory, the boundaries of some ceremony, perhaps, but
also suggests the reductive lines of modernist geometry.
Similarly, in “Seguido por la Tormenta (Followed by the
Storm),” a mass of black gestural marks is also a surging storm cloud and a
vaguely feline predator, bounding after a deer that would be at home on the
walls of Lascaux. Trailing behind the cloud is a tiny, realistically rendered
airplane.
This juxtaposition
places fleeting, ever-changing nature against our leaden, puny attempts to
conquer it, but it also suggests a surprising seamlessness between spiritual
and physical worlds. Not all of the works in the show achieve the same rich
balance, but for the most part Bedia uses the energy of gestural painting to
echo seemingly boundless forces beyond.
Extensive group of images
https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=jose+bedia&hl=en&biw=1527&bih=998&site=webhp&prmd=ivnso&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=g9liTveeBMriiAKM1bWlCg&sqi=2&ved=0CDgQsAQ
LA Times: Art Review:
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2010/05/art-review-jose-bedia-at-latin-american-masters.html