Cuban artist Belkis Ayón, who committed suicide at the age of 32, marked a turning point in the history of latin American engraving art for the exceptional quality of her impressive assemblages of collographs and for the postmodern character of her research. She bursts onto the global art scene at the age of twenty with her works inspired by the myth of Abakuá, an obscure Afro-Cuban religious cult reserved for men, which syncretizes with iconographic elements of Catholic religion. The powerful engravings and large-size collographies she realized since the 90s remind us of Belkis’ existential drama and of her country social crisis, a vision dominated by a raging censorship, violence, intolerance, exclusion, inequalities, control mechanisms and power structures.
