Luis Cruz Azaceta

Los Angeles: UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center Press, 2014. xiii, 146 pages, chiefly colour illustrations; 24 cm. Firm binding, clean inside copy. "Cuban American artist Luis Cruz Azaceta addresses what author Alejandro Anreus calls the wounds and screams of the human condition. Although Cruz Azaceta s work is extensively exhibited and widely collected, this is the first book on the artist s life and creations. Anreus traces Cruz Azaceta's career and explores the themes that are the focus of his singular art. Anreus discusses how the Cuban diaspora, above all, has shaped the artist and how the experience of exile has found expression through starkly forceful self-portraiture in many of his works. Anreus also examines the artist's ongoing concern with current events. Cruz Azaceta has responded to national crises, such as the AIDS epidemic, the Oklahoma City bombing, and the devastation of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina, with graphically powerful paintings, mixed-media pieces, and installations. Over the past four decades Cruz Azaceta has experimented with his visual vocabulary, moving from the flat, pop style of his early canvases, through neo-Expressionism, and into the abstraction of more-current work. His commentary on humanity, however, has not changed. His art continues to remind us that there are no easy solutions to the presence of violence and cruelty, exile and dislocation, and solitude and isolation." - Publisher. CONTENTS: Introduction: The Painter in the Bunker; Exile and Its Context; From Childhood to Exile: Becoming a Painter; The 1980s: The City Painter of Hearts and the Balsero; The 1990s: Broken Realities; The 2000s: Are We Waiting for the End of the World?; An Artist for Our Time.. 1st. Paperback. Fine. 8vo. Collectible.