Marta Maria Perez Bravo

Paolo Curti & Co. Gallery opens its new space with a personal exhibition of the Cuban artist Marta Maria Pérez Bravo.

The choice of this artist come from a careful consideration of the so called Third World emergent situations and is part of the international research on the contemporary art survey that the gallery will pursue. This is the first Italian exhibition of the Cuban photographer, born in L’Havana on 1959.

Marta Maria Pérez Bravo has been using black-and-white photography as the sole support for her work ever since the 1980's.From the early small-format works to her larger-scale pieces her cherished and hallowed assets are presents: her own body, the syncretism of her culture and her search for meaning and identity. Pérez Bravo uses her body as an altar, a vessel, a gate, a temple or a bird-house, that is, as a vivid metaphor of her dreams and visions.

For her, photography is a way of fixing symbolic scenarios, in which she constantly refers to the myths and rituals of Cuban witchcraft, known as Santeria. Although she uses votive offerings and other elements of popular lore.

The exhibition will have 14 large-scale pieces, as Todo lo tengo, todo me falta (I've got everything. I'm lacking everything), Tiene la llave del destino (I have the key of the destiny), Para la entrega (For the giving), in which she appears gathering the remains of her cropped hair in a white sheet.

Marta Maria Pérez Bravo has been invited to many group shows: as the Teatro National of L'Havana in 1981, the first Havana Biennial in 1984, the Dusseldorf Kusthalle in 1991, the Museum of Contemporary Hispanic Art of New York in 1988, the Third Havana Biennial in 1989, and recently the Vienna Kunsthalle for the exhibition "Cuba: maps of desire".

Marta Maria Perez Bravo