Alfredo Sosa Bravo

Alfredo Sosabravo (Sagua la Grande, 25 ottobre 1930) è un pittore, scultore e ceramista cubano.

Painter, draftsman, printmaker, and ceramicist, his constant desire for improvement and his rigorous work developed over the decades of his artistic career turned him into one of Cuba's most significant and representative artists, achieving great consideration and artistic reputation at international levels.

Alfredo Sosa Bravo's (a.k.a. "Sosabravo") artistic story began when, at the age of 20, he was fascinated in front of the artistic works of another great Cuban plastic artist: his countryman Wifredo Lam.

In 1965 he also began to learn about and experiment with the art of ceramics, which fascinated him and brought him to Albisola, Italy.

His exuberant artistic creation still found vent on bare and brightly colored terracotta with the creation of the famous "murals" of Sosabravo.

From the 1970s to the present day, he produced a series of works composed of ceramic parts assembled in the wall and a veritable gallery of ceramic sculptures of various sizes, representing mechanical contraptions and, later, forms of anatomical allegories.

Since the 1990s Alfredo Sosabravo has often traveled to Europe... Italy and with the collaboration of numerous young men and women adherents of the International Civil Service, he paints a massive mural entitled "Peace and War in Monte Sole," (and other pacifist murals he paints in Sardinia).

In Murano he begins a collaboration with ARS Murano.

With them he designs and collaborates on a series of glass sculptures inspired by Man and other creatures of nature (fish, mermaids, etc.).

Alfredo Sosabravo's works are diverse and original: a true personal expression, attentive to the eternal questions of life: nature, man and machine as its extension, in forms and compositions of pure coloristic invention and in which the philosophical and existential reflections of the Artist take the form of written and drawn expression in popular mottos or titles of famous movies that are used with obvious ironic intent.

His artistic works, especially the latest ones, are literal works-writing that follow the Artist's pattern of expression consisting of alphabet letters, words and phrases exploding into rivers, with directional arrows, composite human heads, patched textiles, broken lines intersecting with the painting and lines simulating movement as in a "comic book," spectacles, birds and fish and talking or silent mermaids, areas to colorful paintings.

The almost disturbing presence, at the center of his works, of Man in his eternal moving and becoming in unambiguous atmospheric realities make this Artist beyond interesting.

In 2010, on his 80th birthday, he was celebrated by the international art community and received prestigious recognition and awards from the Cuban government. In 2012, he exhibited his most recent works at the Macro in Rome.