"The expression of facial psychology has rarely been achieved with the detailed realism of Fors. With Renaissance precision, he shows us what cannot be photographed, the spiritual state of suffering that our faces and expressions hide, the obscure realm of sentiment, the abysses of the heart, the desperate lonliness that destroys us"... Humberto Saldana.
This exquisite etching is typical of the kind of raw power Fors infuses into his work. This print was done in Guadalajara, Mexico, where Fors currently resides. he was born in Havana, Cuba in 1958, and moved to the United States in 1960. Traveled to Mexico in 1967, living first in Guadalajara and later moving to Mexico City. In 1976 moved to Miami, Florida and studied for three years with Robert Martinez. He returned to Guadalajara where he lives today.
His first single exhibition was at the Virginia Miller Galleries, Miami, Florida in 1979. He has had notable exhibitions from Miami, Florida to Washington, DC to Boston, Massachusetts to Winnipeg, Canada to Tokyo, Japan to Guadalajara, Mexico.
His work is in the permanent collections of Blanton Museum of Art, in Austin, Texas
San Antonio Museum of Art, in San Antonio, Texas
Wurt Museum, Germany
Museum of Art at the University of Guadalajara, Mexico
Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum in Chicago, Illinois
National Museum of Fine Arts in Cuba; Houston Museum of Fine Arts
Museum of Arts in Fort Lauderdale, Florida
Museum of the Americas, Nicaragua
Photographic Library of Pachuca, Mexico
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California
Museum of Contemporary Arts in Los Angeles, California, among other important institutions.
José Manuel FORS (Cuba 1950) is a contemporary Cuban artist and his work is principally based on installations and supported by photography. His first artistic forays, during the early eighties, were part of what has been coined The Renaissance of Cuban Art. His work has been shown in various solo and group exhibitions in Cuba, Venezuela, Japan, France, Belgium, Mexico, Spain and the United States. He was an artist in residence at the Banff Center in Alberta, Canada, and won the Gold Medal at the 49th International Photographic Salon of Japan in 1989. He has received numerous awards and prizes, including an honorable mention at the First National Salon of Ecological Art in 1996, the Distinction for the National Culture in 1999, and the Alejo Carpentier Medal in 2002.
Born in 1956 in Havana, Cuba. He attended the San Alejandro Academy and the Institute of Museology, both in Havana, Cuba.
Fors was a member of the legendary Volumen I (Volume I), and participated in their first exhibition in 1981 with an installation. During the Eighties, Fors produced installations that were ground-breaking for the Cuban context, and these are perhaps his best known works. Working with natural materials, such as leaves, was a challenge at a time, when something like that was not generally considered art in his country. His installations and other works of this period leaned towards a more conceptual approach. Instead of the universal and trite symbols of time, Fors chose decadence, as a metaphoric image through his dried leaves accumulations to render the passage of time. This was the backbone of his first solo exhibition titled Acumulaciones (Accumulations) in 1983. In those early years, he was engaged in exploring the concept of the passage of time and the evocative power of memory, and these installations proved to be the ideal visual solutions. His work has always revolved around memory in one way or another, either through his photographs or his installations. When he began to exhibit in the late Seventies, photography was far from being his technique of choice. He was trained as a painter and his excursions into photography began when he had to photograph some of his installations. He liked the effect and from then on photography became part of the creative process for him.
