The Why.

Brief Bio

I was born in Cuba, where my father was imprisoned for seven years as a political prisoner. His release came only after he was critically injured and deemed no longer useful to the regime. Soon after, my family received visas to Spain. With nothing but determination and a few gold coins my father had swallowed to hide from the authorities, we left our homeland and began again.

In Madrid, we made a life however we could — including selling sandwiches outside the Plaza de Toros — and I discovered art for the first time. The city’s ancient architecture, its museums, and its streets filled with history awakened something in me. For a Cuban child who had only known deprivation, Madrid’s beauty felt miraculous. It was there that I first understood the power of art to transform the human experience.

At nine years old, I arrived in the United States. From Cuba to Spain, then Spain to New York — each place imprinted itself on my imagination. The dramatic contrast between the scarcity of my early childhood, the grandeur of Madrid, and the electrifying energy of New York shaped my visual language. In Madrid I saw the mastery of classical painters; in New York, I found the audacity of modernity — skyscrapers piercing the clouds and vibrant graffiti culture alive in the subway tunnels. That is where I fell in love with Pop. I studied Lichtenstein and Warhol in galleries and admired Keith Haring tagging walls as my friends and I added our own marks to any blank surface we could find.

Eventually, like many Cubans, we settled in Miami — so close to Cuba, yet worlds away. The tropical light, the saturated colors, the blend of cultures, and the nearness of home were comforting to me. Miami is where I became an artist in full — a place where memory, exile, and possibility coexist.

I have always communicated best through images. Art has been my language, my therapy, and my refuge. With each brushstroke, I feel energy and intention flow. Figures emerge from the white veil of canvas and gesso; their voices are quiet at first, then resolute. They ask to be seen, understood, and liberated.

Women have always been central to my work. Their duality — strength and vulnerability, resilience and tenderness — captivates me. For more than two decades, my wife has been my muse. Her presence, her spirit, and her complexity are the foundation of my practice. Through her, I tell stories of love, endurance, fragility, and power.

Everything I have experienced — exile, wonder, beauty, struggle, and devotion — informs my work. These are the forces that move me to paint, to reveal the soul within the form, and to create images that speak where words falter.

— Andrés Conde

A Critical Biography

by John Sevigny

Andres Conde is a Miami-based Cuban American painter whose work is informed by a range of influences from the sometimes nostalgic esthetics of Edward Hopper to his family's brutal experiences in Cuba.

Born in Havana in 1968, Conde moved to Miami with his family in 1980 after spending a brief period in New York City. He started drawing when he was 14. Conde attended the University of Miami. His first show was at a Miami Beach bar where he worked as a bartender. Conde was 25 at the time.

His early work was inspired by his father's seven-year-imprisonment under the government of dictator Fidel Castro. The work, made when Conde was in his late 20s, was highly critical of Castro's brand of Communism, which was always totalitarianism in a left-wing mask. In particular, it took aim at Ernesto "Che" Guevara, an Argentine guerilla and pop culture icon considered a mass murderer by Cuban exiles and historians despite his omnipresence on T-shirts across the United States and Europe.

"I used to paint pictures of Che with anti-Castro slogans on them but people who were Che fans bought them," Conde remembers. Not long afterward a fellow artist convinced Conde to move away from political work. It's a common course for artists. When you are young you want to tell the world what you believe. But once you've said it, you can't go on repeating yourself. The best artists move on to more personal, less binary work.

Conde's recent work is nostalgic, highly graphic and focuses on the joy of everyday life. Some of his paintings bring back memories of the classic film Casablanca. Others evoke an ironically sad nostalgia for a pre-1959 Cuba. There is also a dose of Miami Beach art deco typefaces to savor. Conde describes his paintings as "scenes of happy times." Those works frequently focus on his wife Stacy Conde, owner of the gallery by which Andres is represented, and his family.

Andres Conde's work is inevitably in part a reaction against the political upheaval that he has seen up close. And that's a good thing. Art needs life-loving artists such as Matisse, Hoffman, Rauschenburg, and Conde just as badly as it needs Kollwitz, German Expressionism and Dada.

*Conde lives and works in Natchez, Mississippi. His work is found in collections across the US, the Caribbean, Europe, Mexico, and South America..