Lydia Rubio (Havana, 1946) is a multidisciplinary artist who has received international recognition and has established herself in the United States since 1960. She has traveled extensively through Europe and Latin America (…). She currently lives in Miami. She has a Master’s in Architecture from the School of Design of Harvard University and a BA in Architecture from the University of Florida and has carried out studies in the Università degli Studi, Florence, Italy. She has been a professor in the Harvard Graduate School of Design, Parsons School of Design and in the University of Puerto Rico.
She emerges as a professional artist in 1980 and her multidisciplinary works stand out for the use of words together with images, in paintings and installations, architecturally integrated through panels carried out with mastery, acuteness and excellent execution.
The profile of her visual repertoire is based on a research on the imagined or perceived representation of nature, artistically expressed as a result of the visibility of the union of the real and the symbolic, which is the central point of her aesthetic proposal. (…) Her aesthetic discourse is connected with Russian constructivism and the Cuban and Brazilian concrete art movement, which had an influence on her artistic style.
(…) Her wide-ranging artistic production includes painting, drawing, artist books and monumental metal sculptures, carried out as a consequence of her insertion into public art. The author has referred to her love of books, which have a special place in her creation. Thus her interest in documenting her work process in notebooks which frequently appear and form part of the work’s conception. Her vocation for that modality has become a significant work volume that structures an important and consistent work body.
(…) The link established between art and architecture in her work is based on her formation as an architect, which has had a great influence on her artistic execution. She learned to easily manage herself in the construction methods and the practical process of execution of each project based on her extensive experience in the work of the public art commissions. (…)
Her creative reflection is a reply to the extreme visual and verbal turbulence of today’s world. Thus the importance that the author attributes to non-figurative art, which can be seen in her recent abstract work, in which she explores a meeting between opposites. (…)
