Heriberto Mora

Heriberto Mora (born December 6, 1965) is a Cuban-American visual artist.

Biography
Born in Vereda Nueva, Havana, Cuba. In 1987 he graduated from the "San Alejandro Fine Arts Academy" in Havana. In 1992 he went to Spain to show his first exhibition "Via Crucis". The next year he moved to Florida and established in Miami - where he still lives and works. The central theme of his work is the human being, its ongoing spiritual quest, and its interaction with the environment. His paintings are a reflection of the tension between the spiritual and material world, between the visible and invisible reality. Over the last seventeen years Mora has had over twenty solo gallery exhibitions as well as dozens of group shows throughout the United States, Spain, Panama, Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic. His work is featured in numerous collections including Frost Art Museum in Miami, Fort Lauderdale Museum of Art, Nassau County Museum of Art in New York; Snite Museum of Art, University of Notre Dame, in Indiana; Berardo Collection, Museo Berardo , in Lisboa, Portugal, the LOWE Art Museum, University of Miami, and the Private Collection of Hugh McColl and Bank of America among others. Mora´s work has been featured in auctions at Sotheby´s, Christie´s and New York´s Contemporary Cuban Art auction and Exhibition. Three of his works were used in a Hollywood film produced by Quentin Tarantino, and his oils have appeared as the covers for twelve different books.

Critic Assestments

 * Heriberto Mora’s paintings are imaginative explorations of the dialogue between two languages of the infinite: space and numbers. Paradoxically, they are often set in enclosed areas which nonetheless appear to extend to the horizon and beyond, a paradox which enables Mora to capture the power of scenarios and other theatrically charged spaces. Multitudes of forms and beings cluster into contained fields interrupted by a single element, an existential hiatus which crowns the moment. Yet the repeating forms are not mechanical but variations, forming a living population of concepts in search for a center of gravity in the imagination. His art is both playful and profound. Mora is one of the most talented and original Cuban-American artists of his generation. Ricardo Pau-Llosa, Art Critic and Poet
 * Mora enjoys good painting, and his work shows it, but he also enjoys having a coherent discourse. His point of departure is his own experience; his results are coherent, reminding us of certain concepts that by their sole meaning are always there —time, fragility, and family, all explained from the artist’s spirituality and sensibility. Marisol Martell, Art Critic Jun. 2002 /
 * The asceticism and austere beauty of Heriberto Mora's work, distance him radically from a facile commercialism and from market values. In spite of their apparent simplicity, the narratives are hidden, “as in a mirror, darkly”, telling of obstacles, doubts and enigmas. Figures and constructions, isolated or congregated, do not aspire to union, instead point to the transcendental. Fragility and solidity, balance and disbalance, naturalness and artifiality, work to suggest a game of tensions, a secret dynamic. Carlos Victoria, Art Critic.
 * In modern times, á la Charles Chaplin, it was still possible to speak about love. Heriberto Mora’s exhibition The Home, at the Miami Carré Rouge Gallery, brings to mind Roland Barthes´ declaration: Discredited by modern opinion, the sentimentality of love must be assumed by the loving subject as a source of transgression that leaves it alone and exposed. Mora dares to name human love not as a tragedy but as a proposal for the reinvention of the world in the space of painting. Sophie Calle and Marina Abramovic have created celebrated performance works around the breakup of love, and in that vein proposes the imagination of a return to utopia. A kind of utopia that is no longer ideological: beyond the perplexity of our times, it locates a form of common hope in the experience of love. That way of returning, in the midst of an explosion of irony, to the domain of human dreams, is in itself a transgression in the space of contemporary painting.  Adriana Herrera, Art Critic, ArtNexus - Feb. 2011