In July and August of this year, the El Reino de Este Mundo art gallery at Havana’s José Martí National Library will host a monographic—but not retrospective—exhibition by Cuban painter and engraver Ibrahim Miranda (Pinar del Río, 1969). His show, Exvotos, includes paintings, engravings and installations, art that he produced between 1993 and 2013; it is a look back at his rising creative work from the last 20 years. “There is a little bit of everything and it’s a way of showing me myself within my own memory, and recounting or telling a story, or perhaps a fable, but with an autobiographical character,” he says. Last year, Miranda held an exhibition with Douglas Pérez, Dos ciudadanos de Utopía (Two citizens from Utopia) at the 8th Floor Gallery in New York. It was a very well-received show that got him access to other spaces, such as Art Basel Hong Kong. However, its most relevant aspect was that it was a clear acknowledgement of Mapas y Mapaglifos, a series in which he externalizes his personal views of Cuba and insularity. Dos ciudadanos de Utopía included a large installation that, with some changes, will be part of Exvotos, and it will be the...

Johny works on his tableaus in series, but each piece has a particular meaning that he achieves not just through its composition, but also through a personal experience, either real or imagined.

While his visual code is realist, his artwork is marked by abstraction, with the evident influence of Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, both of them representatives of so-called abstract expressionism, but “all of this is seen through a filter.”