The most prestigious award given to living artists in Cuba was recently awarded to painter and sculptor Pedro de Oraa. The National Council of Plastic Arts confers every year the National Arts Award, the highest recognition awarded in Cuba to those creators of visual arts as a life achievement recognition. On this occasion, the jury selected the artist and writer Pedro de Oraá. Oráa studied at the San Alejandro Academy in 1952, joined the group Los Once in 1956 and became a founder and influential member of the Ten Concrete Painters "The Group of 10" between 1958 and 1961. Over the last sixty years Oraa has participated in numerous solo and group exhibits, from the V Sao Paulo Biennial in 1959 through the most recent one in Zona Franca, collateral show within the program of the 12th Havana Biennial and in the Concrete Cuba at David Zwirner galleries in London and New York. His works are in the collections of the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Havana, MoMA, New York, The National Museum of Modern Art, Pompidou Centre, France and The Udwig Museum, in Cologne, Germany. Pedro de Oraá made of abstractionism a refined aesthetic expression and activism, building a semantically neat and personal horizon that have transcended in iconography the boundaries of time. Oraá abstraction is a living example of poetic rigor and expansive wit and both a statement of renewed youth. The National Arts Award was presented for the first time in 1994 and is awarded annually to a Cuban visual artist, living and residing in the country, whose production is distinguished by providing a valuable contribution to the development and history of the visual arts in Cuba.
