Amelia Peláez del Casal

Born in Yaguajay, Cuba, Peláez del Casal moved with her family to Havana when she was 20 years old and quickly enrolled at the Academia Nacional de Bellas Artes San Alejandro, where she received a rigorous academic training that emphasised drawing and composition. While her early works reflect this foundation, they also reveal a restless curiosity and an emerging desire to move beyond such academic conventions, an ambition that would soon lead her abroad at a pivotal moment in her artistic formation.

After receiving a small government grant, she travelled to New York City in 1924 and began six months of study at the Art Students’ League before a larger grant enabled her to travel to Paris in 1927. Here, she immersed herself in the intellectual and artistic ferment of the interwar period, studied at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière and absorbed the lessons of Cubism, particularly its structural clarity and bold formal rhythms.

During this time, her contact with fellow Modernist artists, particularly Alexandra Exter and Natalia Goncharova, proved pivotal as her palette intensified and her compositions grew increasingly architectural, balancing Figuration and Abstraction while privileging pattern and structural organisation. Although engaged with European Modernism, Peláez del Casal never relinquished her connection to Cuba, instead, Paris sharpened her ability to reinterpret her own cultural sources with new formal authority.

Returning to Havana in 1934, Peláez del Casal entered a decisive phase of artistic maturity. Rejecting direct imitation of European models, she turned inward, transforming the Cuban domestic interior into the central subject of her work. Windows, balconies, tiled floors, fruits, flowers and ceramic vessels became recurring motifs, rendered in dense, saturated colour and bounded by thick black lines, evoking the luminosity of stained glass and the ornamental richness of colonial architecture. Space in her paintings is deliberately compressed, flattening perspective in favour of rhythmic pattern and structural balance. The resulting synthesis is where modernist Abstraction coexists with a profound sense of cultural memory.

Peláez del Casal’s work is also notable for its subtle engagement with Afro-Cuban traditions, particularly in its emphasis on colour, ornament and the symbolic resonance of everyday objects. Without resorting to narrative or folklore, she elevated the historically feminine and private domestic spheres into a site of formal experimentation and cultural affirmation. In doing so, she challenged conventional hierarchies of subject matter while asserting a distinctly Cuban modern identity.

Beyond painting, Peláez del Casal made significant contributions to public art and design during the 1950s when her interest in architectural integration found monumental expression in her production of several large-scale ceramic murals, many of which can still be seen around Havana today. Her international recognition also grew throughout this time, eventually leading to her representing Cuba at the São Paulo Biennial in 1951 and again in 1957, along with the Venice Biennale in 1952.

Throughout her career, Peláez del Casal exhibited widely in Cuba, Europe and the Americas, earning critical recognition for her synthesis of international avant-garde languages and the architectural, domestic and cultural traditions of Cuba. Today, her paintings are held in major museum collections and continue to occupy a central place in histories of Latin American Modernism.