The Cuban graphic artist, designer and professor Claudio Sotolongo He died this Thursday, January 1st, in Havana. He was 43 years old.
Sotolongo “dedicated his life to exploring the connections between image, collective memory and urban space; his artistic work, deeply reflective and rooted in the history of art and visual anthropology, offered new insights into the city and the processes that shape our environment,” as defined by the National Museum of Fine Arts.
From the biography available on his website, the artist himself stressed: “I am interested in the processes of collecting and archiving images and how these shape our collective memory. I work in city environments paying special attention to the processes that shape the urban landscape: from architecture to vandalism.”
Sotolongo, born in Havana in 1982 and son of the teacher Lazara Menendezwon the Coral Award at the 40th International Festival of New Latin American Cinema for Best Poster for Last days of a house.
Recently he had participated as an exhibitor in HB 2025: Cuban Contemporary Art, as he recalls Latin Press (PL), from which it is noted that the artist was in charge of the graphic design of the dance work YesI always come back, visits to Belkis Ayónfrom the Rosario Cárdenas company, to be released on January 16.
Sotolongo obtained the Rome Prize from the Royal Academy of Spain in Rome (2017 and 2019), and was a resident artist at the Center for the Development of Visual Arts in Havana with the X2 project.
For five years he was a professor at the Higher Institute of Design (ISDi), where he had graduated in 2018. In addition, he worked as an editorial designer in the Academic Publications Directorate of the University of Havana.
His works, PL highlights, have been exhibited in national and international spaces, such as the XIV Havana Biennial (2021), the VII Cuban Salon of Contemporary Art (2007), the Trnava Poster Biennials (2018), Bolivia (2020), Peru (2021), South Korea (2021 and 2023), Lublin (2023) or Warsaw (2023).
Likewise, his name appears in prestigious collections, including the Center for the Studies of Political Graphics, the Center for Cuban Studies in New York, the Margaret Herrick and UCLA libraries, the Cinemateca de Cuba and the Centro Studi Cartel Cubano in Venice.
The National Council of Plastic Arts described him as “a tireless creator who never stopped searching in every corner for a way to enrich Cuban art.”
