Carlos Catasse

Carlos Catasse (1944 – January 19, 2010), born Carlos Tapia Sepúlveda in Santiago, Chile, formed his new last name by combining the first two letters of his first, middle and last names. Catasse is a Chilean painter of international recognition. Since 1969, he has lived and painted in Quito, Ecuador, the country that in 1986 granted him with Ecuador’s National Prize for Painting, the Premio Eugenio Espejo.Catasse has had a great number of individual exhibitions throughout Latin America, as well as, Switzerland, Italy, Germany, Spain, and the United States. After Catasse died in Quito, Ecuador at the age of 65, his remains were cremated in a cemetery in the Ecuadorian capital, and there are plans to open a gallery exhibition of his works.Wikipedia

Servando Cabrera Moreno

Servando Cabrera Moreno (1923–1981) was a Cuban painter. A supporter of the Cuban Revolution, many of his paintings depict the Cuban peasantry. Stylistically, his paintings are rooted in the tradition of vanguardia, and are especially indebted to the work of Carlos Enríquez Gómez.

Servando Cabrera Moreno was born in Havana, Cuba in 1923. He graduated from the San Alejandro Academy after completing studies at the Art Student's League in NY and La Grande Chaumière in Paris. His first individual exhibition took place at the Lyceum, Havana in 1943. He has also participated in many biennials in Venice, Mexico and São Paulo as well as other collective exhibitions. Cabrera Moreno has received a number of prizes at Cuban salons; a gold medal at the Panamerican Tampa Exhibition and silver medal at the International Joan Miró Drawing Contest in Barcelona. His work can be found throughout the world in museums, galleries and private collections.Wikipedia

Ángel Acosta León

Ángel Acosta León (1930–1964) was a Cuban painter.

Angel Acosta Leon disregarded as a painter of Cuban themes, brought up in a poor family and otherwise forgotten by critics during his lifetime, Angel Acosta Leon led a tragic life.

Studying at San Alejandro in his youth, Acosta created art for only nine years, five of which were after he matured as a painter.

His earliest paintings were oils of the sea and harbor and of tree lined parks.

He is generally not well-known for these early works, so there is an excellent chance of one of these paintings surfacing somewhere.

From the very beginning, Acosta struggled as a painter.

His family was poor, and did not understand his need to paint.

He often lived in cramped situations, and not until he was much older could he afford to move out of his family's house and into a room at a Havana mansion.

This familial alienation would become an underlying current in his works.

Acosta had many themes in his work, another of which was sickness and death.

He often painted syringes and crosses along with faces in his art.

Some people say crosses were a sign that he had syphilis, therefore making these very powerful statements.

To this day, Acosta has painted more self-portraits than any other Cuban painter.

Throughout the many struggles in his life, Acosta was never able to fully support himself with his art alone.

To make ends meet he became a tinsmith, a welder and a conductor at a bus station.

This work made a heavy impact on his art, and he began to incorporate metallics in his compositions.

He also used machinery intertwined with organic elements.

During his lifetime, Acosta also created pottery.

Toward the end of his life, he began to paint more abstractly and infused Cubist ideas into his work.

Acosta won a number of awards and exhibited his work all over Cuba and Europe, but his critics failed to see the true potential of his work.

He was not typically seen as a part of the Vanguard movement, and was lost among other more famous painters of the time such as Lam.

In truth, he is just as much a part of the Vanguards as anyone else.

His use of machinery in place of organic elements echoed the political unrest of the country at the time and was truly a social statement.

On a trip back to Cuba from Paris, Acosta attempted suicide a number of times, and finally succeeded by throwing himself into the sea.

He left behind him a large oeuvre, which is now housed all over the world.( Art Finding )

Di Cavalcanti

Emiliano Augusto Cavalcanti de Albuquerque Melo (September 6, 1897 – October 26, 1976), known as Di Cavalcanti, was a Brazilian painter who sought to produce a form of Brazilian art free of any noticeable European influences. His wife was the painter Noêmia Mourão, who would be an inspiration in his works in the later 1930s.

Di Cavalcanti was obviously obsessed with the female body, since very many representations are to be found within the works he produced. The street scenes depicted by Cavalcanti are cheerful, characterized by a palette of bright colors and the depictions of everyday life in a normal, non-romanticized way. They evoke no strong political undercurrent, as do the works of such Mexican muralists of the 1930s and 1940s as Diego Rivera and David Siqueiros. The works produced by these artists were part of the revolutionary movement in opposition of the new revolutionary government who came to power in Mexico. Di Cavalcanti on the other hand refrained from overt political representations, although he himself was in a pursuit of perfecting a pure Brazilian art which had a clear break with European influences.

He tried through the creation of the Semana de Arte in 1922 and the Bienals in 1951 and 1953 to push for a true Brazilian art which was to be seen as separated from European stylistic influences. This was a dream and philosophy which can be seen as an ideal for Di Cavalcanti which was never found as one can see stylistic influences from the Italian Renaissance, Muralism, and the European Modernists.Wikipedia