Tomás Sánchez

Biography

In 1980 the jury of the Joan Miró drawing competition gave first prize to a work called “Desde las aguas blancas” (“From the White Waters”). It was the nineteenth edition of the prize, and for its author, a thirty-two-year-old Cuban, it brought international recognition.

A year later his work was shown at the Joan Miró Foundation in Barcelona.

Tomás Sánchez Requeiro was born on 22 May 1948 in Aguada de Pasajeros, in Cienfuegos province. He is the elder of two sons in a middle-class family: his father worked in the sugar industry and was also a businessman, and Tomás, it is reported, shared his love of painting with his mother. In 1964, at sixteen, he moved to Havana and entered the National Academy of Fine Arts San Alejandro. His studies there were interrupted in 1966, and in 1967 he moved to the newly founded National Art School (ENA), from which he graduated in 1971. That same year he won first prize for drawing at the national exhibition for young artists. After graduating, Sánchez stayed on at the school to teach printmaking and worked there until 1976; by some accounts he headed the printmaking department. In 1975, at the national salon of art professors and instructors in Havana, he won two first prizes: in painting and in lithography. From 1976 to 1978 he worked as a stage designer and puppet designer at the Puppet Theatre, a children’s theatre run by Cuba’s Ministry of Culture. By some accounts he also took part in a UNESCO puppetry group; I could not confirm this from other sources.

The Miró prize of 1980 changed his position. Awards then followed one after another: the National Prize for Painting at the Havana Biennial (1984), a medal at the fifth American Biennial of Graphic Art in Cali, Colombia (1986), and an honorable mention at the International Painting Biennial in Cuenca, Ecuador (1987).

In 1985 the National Museum of Fine Arts in Havana gave him a retrospective. The museum also holds his painting “La otra orilla” (“The Other Shore”, 1985). In 1996 the exhibition “Different Worlds” was held at the Museum of Art in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. For his sixtieth birthday, in May 2008, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Monterrey, Mexico, mounted a large show of his work. In all, his work has been exhibited in more than thirty countries.

In May 2021 Sánchez, together with other Cuban artists, among them Sandra Ceballos and Tania Bruguera, demanded that their works be withdrawn from the National Museum of Fine Arts. They did so in support of Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara, leader of the San Isidro Movement, who, in their words, had been held incommunicado by state security since 2 May. The museum rejected the demand, stating that it did not serve the public interest.