Wilfredo Prieto

Biography

In 2001, thirty flagpoles appeared in Havana, stripped of their usual colours. The work was called “Apolítico”. Other descriptions speak of national flags in shades of grey; either way, the colour has been removed from it while everything else remains recognisable. It was shown at the Havana Biennial, in Ireland, Italy and France. In 2006 it was installed on the Tuileries esplanade in Paris as part of the FIAC outdoor programme.

Prieto was born in 1978 in Sancti Spíritus. He went to Havana to study at the Higher Institute of Art (ISA) and graduated in 2002 with a diploma in painting. By his own account, he had not painted for about ten years. Marcel Duchamp was a model for him, but he did not try to imitate traditional forms and sought to work outside historical and cultural frameworks. Havana remains his point of reference. His medium is different every time: it depends on the idea, and he does not attach himself to any one way of working. Usually he intervenes in a ready-made thing as little as possible: he adds something, removes it or moves it. Often what a work lacks is obvious at once.

In 2000 he received the UNESCO Prize at the 7th Havana Biennial, and in 2001 a second prize at a provincial salon in Sancti Spíritus. His way of working with absence took shape around then. In 2004, at the Nogueras Blanchard gallery in Barcelona, he showed “White Library”: more than five thousand books (by other accounts, more than six thousand) of different formats, with every page blank. The artist spoke of an attempt to capture the viewer’s sensory experience and to reflect on lack and knowledge. The work was shown at the biennials in Singapore and Venice and in Austria, and it is now permanently installed at the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) in Hobart, Tasmania.

At the Havana Biennial in 2006 he placed a small pile in the middle of a huge hall: a rotting banana peel, a bar of soap and a daub of axle grease. The title of the work lists the materials in the order they are laid out. “Half-Full Glass” was shown there too, and attracted a good deal of talk. In the same year he turned a Canadian art museum into a nightclub with disco lights and a dance floor, leaving out only the music (“Mute”). In 2007, in a gallery in Barcelona, he laid a rug in the middle of the floor, gathered up the dust and small bits of dirt from all over the space and swept them under the rug.

He gave the title “Walking the dog and eating shit” to a series of public actions in Lennon Park in Havana.

In 2008 Prieto won the Cartier Award for “Ascending Line”, a red carpet that turns into a flag. It was shown at the Frieze art fair in London that October, and the prize brought a three-month residency at Gasworks. There he prepared “Estanque” (Pond): a hundred oil barrels covered with a layer of water, where a living frog was meant to live. Before that came residencies at the Kadist Art Foundation in Paris (2005), a grant and residency from the Guggenheim Foundation in New York (2006) and a residency at Le Grand Café in Saint-Nazaire (2007). In 2010 he was selected for the Future Generation Art Prize in Kyiv, and in 2013 he received a grant from the Botín Foundation in Santander. In 2011 the CA2M art centre in Madrid showed his largest exhibition to date, “Tied to the Table Leg”, curated by Ferran Barenblit: earlier works and many pieces made specially for the project. His solo shows have included the Kunstverein Braunschweig, S.M.A.K. in Ghent, Hangar Bicocca in Milan, Kunsthalle Lissabon and the Dia Art Foundation in New York. Group exhibitions took place at the Centre Pompidou, at the 55th Venice Biennale, at the biennials in Istanbul, Lyon and São Paulo, at the Yokohama Triennale and at MoMA PS1. His works are in the collections of the Centre Pompidou, the Guggenheim Museum, the National Museum of Fine Arts in Havana, MUDAM, S.M.A.K. and the Daros Latinamerica Collection.

The critics Carlos Granés, Avelina Lésper and Miklos Lukacs do not consider such things art and write that they lack aesthetic and technical value. In 2024 Prieto represented Cuba at the 60th Venice Biennale. He lives and works in Havana.