Glenda León

Glenda León is a Cuban artist born in Havana, in 1976.

León received a graduate degree in visual arts from the Instituto Superior de Arte (ISA) in Havana, She is currently based in Havana and Madrid.

Awards Her internationally acclaimed work has received prizes such as The Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award and residencies like Couvent des Recollets, in Paris and Fonderie Darling, in Montreal. Additional international prizes include the Latin American Roaming Art (LARA) award.

Public collections Her works belong to the permanent collections of the Centre Georges Pompidou, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de La Habana, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Art Gallery of Ontario, The Hammer Museum, and the Pérez Art Museum Miami.

Artistic career León began her Visual Art studies at 12 years old and started showing at a professional level in the year 1999. She also studied Classical Ballet and Philology at the University of Havana, where she got a BA in Art History. The very beginning her work appeared new, in the context of Cuban art, because of her peculiar approach to conceptualism. The use of natural and artificial flowers, texts, sounds and materials like hair and chewing gum were part of her first works. For example, her work titled "Chewed Line from Chewed Ideas series" is a photograph of a piece of gum stretched over a wide distance, creating the effect of abstracting the object.

Many of Léon's works concern the aesthetics of sound, working with "the space where sound and the visual merge," as she describes it. Her 2012 solo exhibition at Magnan Metz in New York, Listening to Silence, focused on the relationship between the visual world and musical compositions, in a series of works made by superimposing empty musical scores over photographs of nature, suggesting that the visual patterns found in the world - the arrangement of birds in the sky, drops of rain on a sheet of glass, the result of a game of dice - could be "played" like music.

In 2013, she produced a major solo exhibition at the Château des Adhémar, in Montélimar, France, where she exhibited various works on paper, sculptures, and installations, including "Wasted Time," a large pile of sand with an hourglass at the top, representing lost time.

Every Sound Is a Shape of Time, a collections-based exhibition at the Pérez Art Museum Miami in 2024, curated by Franklin Sirmans, borrowed its title from an artwork by León, who exhibited alongside seventeen other modern and contemporary artists and their artworks collected for over three decades, from the museum founding to the present.

Exhibitions

Selected solo exhibitions 2016: Galeria Juana de Aizpuru, Madrid, Spain 2020: Changwon Sculpture Biennale 2015: Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno 2021: Arte Contemporánea de Vigo 2020: Museo Extremeño e Iberoamericano de Arte Contemporáneo 2022: Aichi Triennale 2021:15th Cuenca Biennial 2021: Guangzhou Image Triennial 2018: Dakar Biennale 2021: Pilar Juncosa and Sotheby’s Biennial Award for Artistic Creation 2020: DKV Prize 2005 & 2020: Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant 2013: 55th Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy 2023: Protection No Longer Assured at Espacio SOLO - Colección SOLO museum.