Enrique Cabrera

Biography

Enrique Cabrera made his first skull in 2008, while still working as a restorer for the retail chain Sanborns. Since then the skull has become his principal form: he casts them in various sizes, paints them in the colours of Miami, gilds them and places them around cities.

Much of what is written about him is hard to check: almost all the information comes from the artist himself and from the organisers of his exhibitions.

He was born on 14 July 1974 in Poza Rica de Hidalgo, in the state of Veracruz, into a family connected with the arts. As a teenager he played guitar, bass, piano and drums, and in the early 1990s he took up sculpture, mainly in metal. The restorer’s trade took him first to Sanborns and then, in 2010, into government service: he restored historic sculptures on the Bicentennial Route, the itinerary marking the anniversary of Mexican independence, and took part in international restoration projects of the National Centre for Research in the Plastic Arts and the National Institute of Fine Arts and Literature. For the Pueblos Mágicos programme he worked as a photographer, shooting for the tourist trade. In the same year, 2010, his first series of his own appeared, “Trilogía”: sculptures in gold, silver and copper on Mexican motifs.

Then came the series “Skull Miami Colors”, “Virgen de Guadalupe” and “San Miguel Arcángel”, and in 2014 “Palmarius”, skulls of various sizes, the largest of which, in bronze alloy, weighs over half a tonne at two metres high and has been exhibited in several countries. In mid-2019 Cabrera announced that he was making seven skulls for seven cities: Mexico City, Miami, Barcelona, Dubai, Paris, Milan and New York, and in October of that year he represented Mexico at the Art Shopping fair in the Carrousel du Louvre. In 2020, together with the Spanish artist Domingo Zapata, he made “Palmarius Colors”, four mixed-media paintings based on his skulls. His next series, also of seven pieces, he devoted to Naia, the girl whose skeleton, found near Tulum, is held to be the oldest female skeleton in the Americas; in January 2021 he donated one of these sculptures to his native Poza Rica.

On 5 May 2022 “El Toro de Oro”, the eighth work in the series of that name, was unveiled at the Gansevoort Meatpacking Hotel in New York; the showing was timed to New York Art Week and a celebration of Mexican heritage supported by the Mexican Consulate. “El Toro Platino” was then exhibited at the Hamptons Fine Art Fair outside New York. Besides sculpture, Cabrera continues to work in restoration, photography and music.