Guido Llinás

Guido Llinás (born March 21, 1923, in Pinar del Río, Cuba; died in 2005 in Paris, France) was a Cuban painter and printmaker whose abstract practice explored gesture, signs, memory, materiality, and African diasporic visual traditions. Working across painting, engraving, woodcut, collage, and artist books, Llinás combined expressive mark-making with pictographic forms and richly textured surfaces, developing a body of work he called Pintura Negra, or Black Painting.  Llinás attended the School of Fine Arts in Pinar del Río, graduated from the Teachers’ School there in 1942, and earned a degree in pedagogy from the University of Havana in 1953. He later received a Cuban government scholarship to study silkscreen and printmaking in France. As a founding member of Los Once, he helped advance abstraction in 1950s Cuba before settling permanently in Paris in 1963. His work often engaged African sculpture, masks, body painting, textile patterns, calligraphy, exile, and cultural memory, using burlap, paper, oil paint, printed marks, and collage to connect Afro-Caribbean histories with European and American postwar abstraction.  His work was exhibited at the São Paulo Biennial, the Paris Biennale, the Grand Palais, Florida International University’s Art Museum, and the Centre Pompidou. He received a Gold Medal at the Norwegian International Print Triennale in 1995, and his work is held by the Centre Pompidou, Brooklyn Museum, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de Cuba, and the University of Essex. Guido Llinás lived and worked in Paris and its surrounding communities from 1963 until his death.