Julia Valdés Borrero

Julia Valdés Borrero (born February 26, 1952, in Santiago de Cuba, Cuba) is a Cuban visual artist whose multidisciplinary practice explores memory, landscape, architecture, time, and the physical traces left upon built environments. Working across painting, drawing, engraving, ceramics, monotype, collage, and mixed media, Valdés Borrero examines interior spaces, walls, doors, thresholds, and urban surfaces through abstract compositions and materially layered imagery.  Valdés Borrero studied at the José Joaquín Tejada School and Workshop of Visual Arts in Santiago de Cuba from 1962 to 1966 and at the National School of Art in Havana from 1967 to 1972. She later earned a degree in Art History from the University of Oriente in 1989. Her work often engages nostalgia, erosion, cultural memory, landscape, domestic architecture, and the passage of time, using oil, acrylic, jute, fabric collage, paper, glass, and monotype processes to transform weathered surfaces and architectural fragments into psychological and historical spaces.  Her work has been exhibited at the Havana Biennial, Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de Cuba, Galerie Wuensch in Austria, Galería Servando Cabrera Moreno, and galleries and cultural institutions throughout Cuba, Europe, Latin America, and the United States. She has received numerous national painting prizes, the Distinction for National Culture, and the Painting Prize at Arte No Morrazo in Galicia. Julia Valdés Borrero lives and works in Cuba, maintaining strong artistic connections to both Santiago de Cuba and Havana.