Salvador Corratgé

SALVADOR CORRATGÉ (Cuba, 1928-2014)
Untitled, 1983.
Acrylic on canvas.
Signed and dated in the lower right corner.
Measurements: 65 x 81 cm; 69 x 84 cm (frame).

The present work of the Cuban Salvador Corratgé belongs to a particularly fruitful stage of the author, in the context of Concrete Art. The inheritance of lyrical abstraction, filtered by new exploratory efforts, is expressed in it.

Born in Havana into a family of Catalan origin, he began his career as a painter at a time when abstraction was gaining ground and gaining strength on the island. Artistically he was highly motivated by architecture, music and Japanese culture. Corratge attended the San Alejandro Art Academy between 1949 and 1950, and immediately after, between 1950 and 1951, he enrolled at the University of Havana to study architecture. In 1953 he exhibited with members of the group Los Once. At the end of the decade, Corratge became one of the members of the relevant group 10 Pintores Concretos (1958-1961), maintaining until the end of his life his pictorial research within that creative line. After the Cuban Revolution of 1959, between 1963 and 1967, he was appointed Cultural Attaché in the Republic of Czechoslovakia, where he had his first personal exhibition. A decade later, between 1977 and 1981, he occupied a similar position in the Cuban embassy in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (North Korea). Around 1961, he was one of the founding members of the National Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba (UNEAC), a governmental union that brings together artists, writers and intellectuals. In 1995 he received the Order for National Culture awarded by the Council of State of the Republic of Cuba, and in 2014 he was one of the finalists to receive the National Plastic Arts Award. During the last decade, the art world has set its eyes on Corratge's painting, as a result of the international attention received by the Latin American Abstract movements developed after World War II. In 2011, and following the exhibition organized by the Fundación Juan March in Madrid, América Fría: La Abstracción Geométrica Latinoamericana entre 1934 - 1973, his work was recognized as one of the most radical and coherent of Cuban origin in the genre.