Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Arts, Latin America & Caribbean
Wilfredo prieto contemporary cuban artist
Wilfredo Prieto was born in 1978 (Sancti Spíritus; Cuba). He is linked to conceptual art. He moved to Havana to pursue his art studies at the famed Higher Institute of Fine Arts (ISA), graduating in 2002.
Wilfredo prieto speaking badly about stones at s m a k in ghent
Overview
He has a university diploma as a painter but he has not painted anything for the last 10 years. He admires the conceptualist Marcel Duchamp but tries to distance himself from any traditional way of making art and also tries to stay free of any particular historical or cultural, considerations that could avoid his creativity. Havana is certainly a significant point of reference and a very important focus for him.
His medium keeps changing, it depends on the particular idea or the concept he is working on and he never gets attached to any way of working. Most of the time, the missing elements in Prieto’s work are obvious.
In fact, in 2001, he did his most widely known work “Apolítico” with 30 flagpoles stripped of their familiar colours. This show has been shown in Ireland, Italy and France. In 2004, the more than 5,000 books that comprised his Biblioteca Blanca were utterly blank (White Library). This show went to the biennial exhibitions in Singapore and Venice, and will travel next to Austria. For the 2006 Havana Biennial, he contributed a rotting banana peel, a bar of soap and a daub of axle grease, which he placed in a neat little pile on a floor of the exhibition space. He tampers with the ordinary until it becomes unlikely but not entirely impossible. In 2006, he also transformed a Canadian art museum into a dance club, with disco lights, dance-floor, and everything except the music (Mute). In 2007, in a Barcelona gallery he once laid a rug in the middle of the floor, then carefully combed the gallery space for all the little bits of dirt and dust he could find, which he then swept under the rug (Untitled/Red Carpet).
One of his most recent works is called "Walking the dog and eating shit", which was a number of public exhibitions he did in Lennon Park in Havana.
Prieto recently won the 2008 Cartier Award, which entitles him to a three-month residency in London. He plans to use the time there to install a project he calls Estanque (Pond), which consist in covering the top of 100 oil barrels with a layer of water and serving as a makeshift habitat for a living frog.
Prizes and grants
2013 Beca de Artes Plásticas Fundación Botín, Santander
2011 Seleccionado para el Premio Internacional de Arte Diputació de Castelló
2010 Seleccionado para Future Generation Art Prize 2010, Kiev, Ucrania
2008 The Cartier Foundation Award, con residencia en Gasworks, Londres.
Premio F, Buenos Aires Beca de Creación Norte 08, Zaragoza
2007 Residencia en Le Grand Café, St Nazaire, Francia
2006 Residencia John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, Nueva York
2005 Kadist Art Foundation, Paris, residencia
2001 Segundo Premio, Salón Provincial Oscar F. M., Sancti-Spíritus
2000 Premio a la mejor curaduría 2000, Galería Habana, DUPP, La Habana. The 2000 UNESCO
Prize for the Promotion of the Arts, VII Bienal de la Habana, DUPP, La Habana
Mosquera, Gerardo. A one liner philosopher, Art in America, septiembre 2012
Alessi, Chiara. Wilfredo Prie Balancing the curve, Art-Domus, Milán, agosto 2012
Bardier, Laura. Wilfredo Prieto and the Work of Art as a Direct Gesture, Literature and Arts of the Americas, Issue 82, Vol. 44, No.1, 2011, pp. 143-148
Guerrero, Inti. A question of choosing, Metropolis, Oct-Nov, 2011, pp. 47-53
Hernández, Erena. Ser y nada, Atlántica Revista de Arte y Pensamiento, Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno, #48/49, pp. 228-235
Dalila López Arbolay, Parachute 125: La Havana, Les intuitions illogiques de Wilfredo Prieto, enero-marzo 2007
Anaïd Demir, Jardin des Tuileries, Journal des Arts, 28 de octubre de 2006
Barriendos, Joaquín, La ciudad latinoamericana como reflexión estética, Lars, Nº5, 2006
Barriendos, Joaquín, The IX Biennial of Havana, FlashArt, Nº248, mayo-junio 2006
