Arguably the most famous painting by Antonia Eiríz, Una tribuna para la paz democrátic
Arguably the most famous painting by Antonia Eiríz, Una tribuna para la paz democrática (“A podium for democratic peace”) sits on permanent display at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Havana. Eiríz’s prominent stature within Cuba stands as a testament to the subtlety with which she navigated the political strictures on artmaking under the revolution, as well as later in the Cuban diaspora. This history has often led to a whitewashing of the biting criticality of her work. As Alejandro Anreus has argued, “This ‘critical essence’ consists of an uncompromising neofigurative visual vocabulary, one in which all subjects—particularly ‘sacred’ ones referring to motherhood, leadership, and patriotism, among others—are up for an autopsy-like inspection.” Anreus’ invocation of the mortuary is entirely fitting, given that all of the beings in Eiríz’s paintings appear as something like zombies or ghosts, with even the most human-like figures scorched and flayed beyond recognition. Espousing this visceral ambiguity, Eiríz refused to align herself directly with either Castro’s new Cuba or the reactionary exile community in Miami. Instead, she offered a more profound commentary on the brutality of human nature and the systems it creates—representation, rhetoric, and the like—that uphold hierarchies and reinforce subjugation and alienation. This empty podium flanked by banners and ghostly people (whose only distinctive characteristic is their color, black or white) reads as a reference to the empty nationalist propaganda embraced by Castro just as easily as it maps onto our present American political crisis.Antonia Eiríz, Una tribuna para la paz democrática (A podium for democratic peace), 1968 -- source link