Yuniel Delgado Castillo

Biography

Yuniel Delgado Castillo (Havana, 1984)

Cuban visual artist who currently resides in Madrid and is considered the enfant terrible of the new Cuban painting. Graduated with honors from the Academy of Fine Arts of San Alejandro (2011), in the specialty of painting, he managed to establish a prestigious credit in the Cuban art scene, inside and outside the island. His main virtues are the honesty and passion with which he faces painting and the very act of painting. Those who know him can give of an incredibly tedious and volcanic subjectivity that he does not stop working and producing great works at all times.

His restless character and his affective predisposition towards the medium have made him a tremendously versatile and muscular artist. Hence his constant explorations in the field of different techniques, supports and languages such as engraving, sculpture, installation and drawing, being the grammar of painting where he flaunts all his power. From the beginning of his career and up to the present, he has made his vocation for large formats evident, which has had its impact on the foreshadowing of important mural and installation projects, including environmental sculpture and even some other performative gesture that they certify their commitment and the levels of complicity with the aesthetic fact itself, even beyond any social approval.

He has always manifested extreme freedom during (and facing) the creative process that leads him to great emancipation and places him in an ethical and emotional comfort zone with himself. Spontaneity is, without a doubt, one of his strengths at the same time that it becomes an axiomatic key to understand his methodology and way of working. Most of the time -or almost always- he dispenses with sketches or previous ideas so they can hinder that relationship of cleanliness (not contaminated) that is locked between the act of making and the blank canvas. Like the rest of the artists, he is guided by the obsession with the search for his own style, widening the classificatory and reductionist limits of art in general, to dispense a genuine, sensitive and truthful production. Something that without the slightest doubt he has achieved with great effort and a little less than enviable tenacity.

Barely a student at the famed Academy, he held his first personal exhibition at the Centro Pro-Danza in 2006, drawing critical attention for the irreverent appearance of his work. In 2013 he traveled to the United States as part of a group exhibition held at the Aicon Gallery in New York. Coinciding with this exhibition, he carried out other presentations until he moved to Boston to open a studio as an artist. Despite the success and the projects, the inclement weather forced him to settle in South Florida, where he opened his own workshop-gallery in December 2014. He was lucky enough, at that time, to have been nominated for the grants and commissions program of the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation (CIFO) in Miami. He has also been awarded residency programs and group exhibitions in Napoli, Italy, in 2016, at the Pam Museum, and in Copenhagen, Denmark, in 2019. In addition, he has lectured on his art at the Roberson Art Gallery of the Pennsylvania State University. He participated on several occasions in auctions and art fairs such as those in Florence and Denmark. His work is found in public and private collections, especially in Germany, the United States, Canada, Italy, Spain, Russia, Portugal, Luxembourg, Costa Rica, in other countries of Europe, Asia and Latin America.