Alfredo Sosabravo

“The first glass by Sosabravo”. This collection is a great opportunity for Ars Murano and its masters Elio Raffaeli and Roberto Cammozzo and Renzo Vianello, who had the chance to interpret one of the most important contemporary Cuban artists and to pay homage to Cuba, a lively, joyful and both simple and complicated land. For Sosabravo, this is a true initiation, his first glass works, his complex and original drawings translated into a transparent and colorful matter, with their linear design but also richness of details, interpreted by the glass masters according to their emotions.
The subjects are new and unusual in the panorama of artistic glass making in Murano. They manifest a very rich imagination and a deep sense of art and their essence is revealed in the magic of Venetian glass. The glass works bring out Sosabravo’s poetics giving him a new way of expressing himself, through a form of art that is far from new in our island.

The result is exciting: as always, the glass masters and their strong team of artisans have actualize an idea, turning it into a living and burning matter, bound to hold forever the secret of fire. Only by living the hustle and bustle, the heat and the atmosphere of an active furnace, can one understand the special melting of creativity and complete trust that joins together artists with different education and different experience in a single way of expression.

Translating into glass one of Sosabravo’s drawings is not an easy task, technically it is very hard to keep all the details. The ultimate goal is to speak a different language without losing the original message. It is the it is only through his devotion, humility and intimate knowledge of the substance, now liquid and incandescent, now hard and cold, that the glass maker can respect the original features and clearly communicate the personality of Sosabravo.

This process is exciting as it means combining the historical tradition of Murano with a continuous exploration of new paths. It is an experience that refreshes both the mind and the spirit and allows us to reach very distant limits, like Sosabravo and his gorgeous Cuba.

Marina Raffaeli

Biography

Alfredo Sosabravo was born on October 25, 1930 in Sagua La Grande, Cuba.

He studies at the Arts Academy in San Alejandro, but he is mostly a self-taught person.

Beginning in 1958, his oil paintings and his drawings are displayed in a theater in La Havana and he participates to a number of important national exhibitions.

A couple of years later, he works as engraver, learning a technique that together with ceramics will define his artistic development since 1965.

During his career he received many awards, in Cuba and abroad among which, in 1976, a gold medal at the 34th International Competition for Contemporary Artistic Ceramics in Faenza, Italy.

Painter, engraver, designer, ceramist, thanks to his great desire to reach perfection and to his work ethics, Sosabravo is today one of the most important artists and universally well known.

His work is characterized by three main original themes: nature, the human being and the machine all drawn together in a complex aesthetic unit.

Sosabravo was given the most significant awards in his country: Orden Felix Verela and Premio National De Artes Plasticas, which attest his fundamental contribution to the Cuban cultural scene.

His glass sculptures are the result of a very important artistic collaboration with ARS MURANO that began in 1998.