Florencio Gelabert Y Perez (Cuban, 1904-1995)
Hand carved, signed; 1979
Materials: Cuban wood (mahogany?)
Dimensions 23 X 4 X 4 inches
Label affixed to underside: National Registry of Cultural Assets of the Republic of Cuba Ministry of Culture.
Provenance: Art Master Collection, Miami, Florida.
Florencio Gelabert, with a style reminiscent of Art Deco and Art Nouveau in a Latin American Expressionist stylization. Carved wood sculpture. Depicts a modernist stylized form of a man in a streamline moderne style.
José Florencio Gelabert Pérez (Caibarien, 1904 - Havana, 1995) Cuban musician, sculptor, draftsman and teacher. He graduated from the San Alejandro National Academy of Fine Arts in 1934. He received numerous awards, mentions and recognitions in Fine Arts Halls and Circles. His works are in the permanent collection of the National Museum of Fine Arts. Florencio Gelabert is a renowned sculptor, who made more than twenty solo exhibitions beginning in 1929, several in the National Museum of Fine Arts, and participated in more than thirty collectives in Cuba, Spain and Brazil, the latter in the Sao Paulo Biennial. he traveled from Caibarién to Santa Clara in 1928 to audition to enter the famous San Alejandro Fine Arts School in Havana. He obtained one of the five vacancies. Already in the Cuban capital, he combined fine arts and music. When he graduated, he became a professor in San Alejandro and the academy’s principal in 1960.
With a calling common to wood sculptors –which began with his primary school carving carpentry classes and the active life of his home town’s shipyards, his chisels and gouges feverishly turned mahogany, “ácana” and ebony into female heads with black African features dating back to 1930.
In 1938 he used his savings to explore Europe: France (Paris, Marseilles), Italy (Naples, Rome, Florence, and Venice), Belgium (Malina). His encounter with the works by Aristide Maillol, Auguste Rodin, Ossip Zadkine, Constantin Brancusi and even with Wifredo Lam, who was also born in another Cuban coastal area, Sagua la Grande, and his encounter with the nude marble David sculpture...
Category
1970s Art Deco Philip Paval Figurative Sculptures