Miami Dade College’s (MDC) Museum of Art + Design (MOAD) is presenting “A Painter and Her Audience,” a lifetime retrospective exhibition by Cuban-born painter Antonia Eiriz. Opening on Friday, Sept. 13, the exhibition is organized by the museum and curated by Michelle Weinberg, a Miami-based artist and creative director at Girls’ Club in Fort Lauderdale.
“A Painter and Her Audience” opens the fall season at the college’s flagship institution dedicated to the presentation and exhibition of visual art and design, housed at the National Historic Landmark Freedom Tower at Miami Dade College in Downtown Miami. An opening reception is scheduled for Thursday, Sept. 12, from 7 to 9 p.m. The exhibition and opening reception is open free to the public.
Antonia Eiriz (1929-1995) developed a highly personal style as a painter, boldly addressing themes such as the machinations of power, propaganda and human suffering in a manner suffused with wry metaphors, irony and dark humor.
Her work was admired by and highly influential to a generation of Cuban artists in the 1960s, and she left a profound imprint on her many students in Cuba. Her works are related to parallel developments in painting by American and European artists who explored surrogate motifs for the human figure such as Philip Guston and John Walker. The intensity of the surfaces she crafted provides an analog for human physical and emotional suffering, as in works by contemporaries Leon Golub and Nancy Spero. One can make a direct connection from Goya to Francis Bacon and Edvard Munch to Eiriz’s work, for their shared obsession with the fragility, moral ambiguity and the darker aspects of human existence.
Antonia Eiriz: A Painter and Her Audience also will include works by contemporary Cuban and Cuban-American artists whose remembrances and influences of Eiriz testify to the continued relevance of her contributions as a painter. Among these are works by Luisa Basnuevo, José Adriano Buergo, Ana Albertina Delgado, Nereida García Ferraz, Guido Llinás, Ana Mendieta, Glexis Novoa, Sandra Ramos, Tomás Sánchez and Gladys Triana.
A catalog with illustrations and texts by Janet Batet and Michelle Weinberg accompany the exhibition.
A public panel discussion about Eiriz’s significant career featuring curator Michelle Weinberg, arts writer Janet Batet and participating artists Nereida García Ferraz and Gladys Triana is scheduled for Tuesday, Oct. 1, 7 p.m., at the museum. The discussion is open free to the public.
The exhibition will be on display through Nov. 17. Museum hours are Wednesday- Sunday, noon to 5 p.m. Admission is free and private tours are available.
