Havana
Havana (; ) is the capital and largest city of Cuba. The heart of La Habana Province, Havana is the country's main port and commercial center.
León received a graduate degree in visual arts from the Instituto Superior de Arte (ISA) in Havana, while also graduating from the
Academy of Media Arts Cologne
The Academy of Media Arts Cologne (KHM) is the art and film school of the state of North Rhine Westphalia. It was founded 1989 in Cologne, Germany. Notable artists and filmmakers who studied or taught at the academy include Rosa Barba, VALIE EX ...
in
Cologne, Germany
Cologne ( ; ; ) is the largest city of the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia and the fourth-most populous city of Germany with nearly 1.1 million inhabitants in the city proper and over 3.1 million people in the Cologne Bonn urba ...
in 2007. She is noted for her body of work spanning from
drawing
Drawing is a Visual arts, visual art that uses an instrument to mark paper or another two-dimensional surface, or a digital representation of such. Traditionally, the instruments used to make a drawing include pencils, crayons, and ink pens, some ...
to
video art
Video art is an art form which relies on using video technology as a visual and audio medium. Video art emerged during the late 1960s as new consumer video technology such as video tape recorders became available outside corporate broadcasting. V ...
, including installation, objects, and photography. León is "interested in interstices between visible and invisible, between sound and silence, between ephemeral and eternal." She is currently based in Havana and Madrid.
Awards
Her internationally acclaimed work has received prizes such as The Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award and residencies like Couvent des Recollets, in Paris and Fonderie Darling, in Montreal. Additional international prizes include the Latin American Roaming Art (LARA) award.
Public collections
Her works belong to the permanent collections of the
Centre Georges Pompidou
The Centre Pompidou (), more fully the (), also known as the Pompidou Centre in English and colloquially as Beaubourg, is a building complex in Paris, France. It was designed in the style of high-tech architecture by the architectural team of ...
,
Montreal Museum of Fine Arts
The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA) is an art museum in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. It is the largest art museum in Canada by gallery space. The museum is located on the historic Golden Square Mile stretch of Sherbrooke Street west.
The MMFA ...
,
Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de La Habana
The National Museum of Fine Arts of Havana (Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de La Habana) in Havana, Cuba is a museum of fine arts that exhibits Cuban art collections from the colonial times up to contemporary generations.
History
It was founded o ...
,
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH), is an art museum located in the Houston Museum District of Houston, Texas. The permanent collection of the museum spans more than 5,000 years of history with nearly 80,000 works from six continents. Follo ...
, Art Gallery of Ontario, The Hammer Museum, and the
Pérez Art Museum Miami
Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM)—officially known as the Jorge M. Pérez Art Museum of Miami-Dade County—is a contemporary art museum that relocated in 2013 to the Maurice A. Ferré Park in Downtown Miami, Florida. Founded in 1984 as the Cent ...
.
Artistic career
León began her
Visual Art
The visual arts are art forms such as painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture, ceramics, photography, video, image, filmmaking, design, crafts, and architecture. Many artistic disciplines such as performing arts, conceptual art, and texti ...
studies at 12 years old and started showing at a professional level in the year 1999. She also studied Classical Ballet and Philology at the
University of Havana
The University of Havana (UH; ) is a public university located in the Vedado district of Havana, the capital of Cuba. Founded on 5 January 1728, the university is the oldest in Cuba, and one of the first to be founded in the Americas. Originall ...
, where she got a BA in
Art History
Art history is the study of Work of art, artistic works made throughout human history. Among other topics, it studies art’s formal qualities, its impact on societies and cultures, and how artistic styles have changed throughout history.
Tradit ...
. The very beginning her work appeared new, in the context of Cuban art, because of her peculiar approach to
conceptualism
In metaphysics, conceptualism is a theory that explains universality of particulars as conceptualized frameworks situated within the thinking mind. Intermediate between nominalism and realism, the conceptualist view approaches the metaphysical ...
. The use of natural and artificial flowers, texts, sounds and materials like hair and chewing gum were part of her first works. For example, her work titled "Chewed Line from Chewed Ideas series" is a photograph of a piece of gum stretched over a wide distance, creating the effect of abstracting the object.
León has exhibited in the Havana and Venice biennials since 2012. Some of her best known installations are ''Interpreted World, Lost Time'' and the videos ''Inversion, Every Breath'' and ''Destiny''. Her work has been published and reviewed by different art magazines and newspapers such as ''Bomb Magazine'', ''ArtNexus'', ''ArtForum'', ''ArteCubano'' among others.
A recurring theme in Léon's work is the juxtaposition of the natural and the artificial. In 2004, Léon conducted a large-scale outdoor installation in Montréal, entitled "Esperanza (Out of Season)", in which she adhered fake branches and leaves to the trees in a public park - a work that only became visible with the passing of the season, as the trees' leaves slowly and naturally dropped away, revealing the imitation branches in stark contrast. Léon reprised this project for Site Santa Fe's 2014 Biennial of the Americas, "Unsettled Landscapes."
Many of Léon's works concern the aesthetics of sound, working with "the space where sound and the visual merge," as she describes it. Her 2012 solo exhibition at Magnan Metz in New York, ''Listening to Silence'', focused on the relationship between the visual world and musical compositions, in a series of works made by superimposing empty musical scores over photographs of nature, suggesting that the visual patterns found in the world - the arrangement of birds in the sky, drops of rain on a sheet of glass, the result of a game of dice - could be "played" like music.
In 2013, she produced a major solo exhibition at the
Château des Adhémar
The Château des Adhémar is a castle, later converted to a Renaissance style château, in the French town of Montélimar in the Drôme département. It is located on a hill in the centre of the town.
History
Its origins are found in the 11t ...
, in
Montélimar
Montélimar (; Vivaro-Alpine dialect, Vivaro-Alpine: ''Montelaimar'' ; ) is a town in the Drôme Departments of France, department in the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes Regions of France, region in Southeastern France. It is the second-largest town in t ...
, France, where she exhibited various works on paper, sculptures, and installations, including "Wasted Time," a large pile of sand with an hourglass at the top, representing lost time.
In 2013 she took part in the Cuban Pavilion at the 55th
Venice Biennial
The Venice Biennale ( ; ) is an international cultural exhibition hosted annually in Venice, Italy. There are two main components of the festival, known as the Art Biennale () and the Venice Biennale of Architecture, Architecture Biennale (), ...
, where she showed a project entitled ''Music of the Spheres'', a spherical glass music box suspended from the ceiling that played a 30-second, looped composition whose musical notes relate to the position of the planets in the
Solar System
The Solar SystemCapitalization of the name varies. The International Astronomical Union, the authoritative body regarding astronomical nomenclature, specifies capitalizing the names of all individual astronomical objects but uses mixed "Sola ...
on a given day.
''Every Sound Is a Shape of Time'', a collections-based exhibition at the
Pérez Art Museum Miami
Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM)—officially known as the Jorge M. Pérez Art Museum of Miami-Dade County—is a contemporary art museum that relocated in 2013 to the Maurice A. Ferré Park in Downtown Miami, Florida. Founded in 1984 as the Cent ...
in 2024, curated by Franklin Sirmans, borrowed its title from an artwork by León, who exhibited alongside seventeen other modern and contemporary artists and their artworks collected for over three decades, from the museum founding to the present.
Exhibitions
Selected solo exhibitions
* 2016: Galeria Juana de Aizpuru, Madrid, Spain
* 2020: Changwon Sculpture Biennale
* 2015: Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno
* 2021: Arte Contemporánea de Vigo
* 2020: Museo Extremeño e Iberoamericano de Arte Contemporáneo
* 2022: Aichi Triennale
* 2021:15th Cuenca Biennial
* 2021: Guangzhou Image Triennial
* 2018:
Dakar Biennale
The Dakar Biennale, or Dak'Art - Biennale de l'Art Africain Contemporain, is a major contemporary art exhibition that takes place once every two years in Dakar, Senegal. Dak'Art's focus has been on Contemporary African Art since 1996.
History
...
* 2021: Pilar Juncosa and Sotheby’s Biennial Award for Artistic Creation
* 2020: DKV Prize
* 2005 & 2020: Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant
Selected group exhibitions
* 2015: Havana Biennal, Havana, Cuba
* 2014: SITElines 2014: Unsettled Landscapes, Site Santa Fe, Santa Fe, NM
* 2013: 55th Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy
* 2000: First National Festival of Video Art at The Ludwig Foundation of Cuba
* 2023: ''Protection No Longer Assured'' at Espacio SOLO - Colección SOLO museum.