During the past month of May, Roberto Fabelo participated with large-format drawings and a silk in the fair Art Miami New York, which took place at Pier 94 from the 14th to the 17th, during Frieze Week. At this event, framed within one of the most intense and exciting seasons of the NY art world, he was represented by the CernudaArte gallery.
At the same time, the thirty drawings exhibited at the Museum of Latin American Art in Los Angeles from June to November of 2014, which had become part of the collection Related Group, reached their final destination: the Perez Art Museum of Miami. They are now available to all visitors as part of that institution’s permanent exhibition.
In the Cuban capital, the artista has been involved in recent days in several of the most important events that take place during the 12th Havana Biennial. With the large-format piece Chicharrón en el muro, he is participating in the collective exhibition HB, organized by the Cuban Cultural Assets Fund and the National Council of Visual Arts, which opened on May 21 at Pabexpo. A day earlier the show Crack opened at Galería Habana, and Fabelo is participating in that with two works: one in metal, Mundo dorado, and a sculpture from the series La mesa. On the same day that the show opened, the second piece was acquired for the collection of Galila Barzalai (Belgium).
The first two pages of the most recent edition of the magazine Art OnCuba, launched on the 21st at the Hotel Meliá Cohiba, are devoted to the piece by Fabelo that is part of another collateral project at the Biennial: Detrás del muro 2. Set up on Havana’s Malecón, this includes more than fifty urban interventions, including Delicatessen, a cooking pot three meters high and two wide, with about 4,000 forks inside, referring to the struggle for survival in everyday life.
Delicatessen, 2015
Likewise, at the San Carlos de La Cabaña Fortress, the curators of the exhibition Zona Franca (Duty-free Zone) decided to dedicate one of the site’s vaults to the work of Fabelo. The artist responded to that invitation with a single piece measuring 190 x 250 cm, a cast iron cooking pot featuring 33 male figurines marching in a circle around its opening. Zona Franca opened on May 21, and on the 29th, the New York Times published an article on the Biennial accompanied by a photo of Fabelo’s piece, La ronda infinita. The article, under the headline The Havana Biennial Is Running at Full Throttle, was penned by Holland Cotter, with photos by Lisette Pool.
La ronda infinita, 2015
On the 28th, Fabelo inaugurated his latest solo show, Persistencia (Persistence), at the Galería Artis718, attached to the Cuban Cultural Assets Fund. The exhibition consists of four large-format oil paintings on canvas, two installations, and two works on metal, one of them entitled La caldosa and published in Art OnCuba (issue No. 06), Art Forum (No. 9, Vol. 53) and Art Pulse (back cover, No. 22, Vol. 6 of 2015) to announce Fabelo’s participation in Art Dallas, Art Miami New York and the Havana Biennial. On the same day Fabelo’s show opened, the same piece was acquired by Related Group, led by Jorge Pérez.
From left to right: Roberto Fabelo, Jorge Pérez, Tomás Sánchez & Darlene Pérez
That same afternoon, Christie’s auction house in New York made available a piece created by Fabelo in 1996 titled Pequeño teatro, which was estimated at $60,000 and sold for $106,250.
Pequeño teatro, 1996
In another development, the award-winning art critic Donald Kuspit, one of the most outstanding in his field today, recipient of the Frank Jewett Mather award and professor art history and philosophy at New York’s Stony Brook University, concluded an article on Fabelo’s work for an upcoming issue of the magazine Art Pulse, whose cover will feature the artist’s work. Kuspit defines Fabelo in his article as “a master of all visual media that he touches and transforms.”