Gallery On Greene
Key West, Florida Art Gallery

Juan Gil Garcia

Gallery On Greene  is pleased to represent Juan Gil Garcia.

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Juan Gil Garcia arrived in Cuba in 1889 from Madrid, Spain. He has been frequently under-rated by art critics as superficial colonial, and since the revolution he has been stigmatized as the incarnation of a mercenary painter of still lifes. Nevertheless, his work has been greatly enjoyed and sought after with a popularity rarely seen for a Cuban painter.

More than the artistic significance of Gil Garcia's work, many think, is the interest in one specific moment in the life of Cuba as an expression of a specific facet and time capsule of Cuban life and way of thinking and living of the petite bourgeois in a political context during the first decades of the 20th Century.

The pictorial vein which Gil Garcia tapped seemed inexhaustible and the rate of production grew as did his fecundity and esteem. There wasn't, it seemed, an upper middle class Cuban dining room without a Gil Garcia.
Gil García died in the 1930s. With his death an entire style of Cuban art disappeared. It is said, by the powers that be currently in Cuba that "The disease he insinuated in the milieu of his world only had one cure: THE REVOLUTION!"


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