Gustavo Ojeda

Gustavo Ojeda (September 8, 1958 – August 23, 1989) was a Cuban-American painter.

Born in Havana, Cuba, Ojeda emigrated bearing in mind his family in 1967, first to Spain and subsequently to the United States, eventually settling in Fairfax, Virginia. At 17, he moved to New York City to attend Parsons School of Design, where his teachers included the painters William Clutz and Kestutis Zapkus. Upon graduation, he was awarded a fellowship from the Cintas Foundation (see Oscar B. Cintas) allowing him to spend a year painting in Spain, an experience which, according to Ojeda, "served to gain school out of my system." It was in Spain that Ojeda first began experimenting in the same way as nightscapes, a mode which would come to predominate his be active throughout his short life.

After returning to New York, Ojeda mounted his first one-man show, "Works from Spain 1980," at the Seventeenth Street Gallery, garnering attention primarily in the downtown and Spanish-language art press. In 1981 he was awarded a Studio Fellowship at add-on 1 (now MoMA PS1) in Long Island City, an great compliment renewed in 1982, when he was also unchangeable a one-man exploit in the space's main gallery; it was titled "Night Paintings." That same year he had unorthodox one-man take action of pastels upon paper titled "An Intimate Look" in the Rotunda gallery of the Pan American Health Organization in Washington, DC, the little brochure for which boasted appreciations from the well along head of Sotheby's Latin American art division, Giulio V. Blanc, and the Cuban poet and art critic Ricardo Pau-Llosa.

Over the next few years Ojeda appeared in numerous organization exhibits across the United States, including New York, Los Angeles, Miami and Chicago. His association, however tangential, with the burgeoning East Village art scene of the to the fore 80s even earned him attention in Europe, for example the "East Meets West" show of 'East' Village artists at the Zellermayer Galerie in Berlin, in what was still 'West' Germany.

This early success culminated in Ojeda's combination in "An International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture," a panoramic snapshot of global contemporary art mounted by MoMA in 1984 to celebrate its newly expanded facilities. Of the 165 artists from 17 countries included, only 23-year-old Jean-Michel Basquiat was younger than Ojeda, who was 25.

Ojeda spent the adjacent year traveling in Spain and Mexico, and was preparing two one-man shows to be held in Soho and Los Angeles in imitation of his health began to fail him. In 1986 he was diagnosed considering AIDS. That year his one-man doing opened at the Michael Kohn Gallery in Los Angeles, followed in March, 1987, by one at the David Beitzel Gallery in New York. By that grow old AIDS-related Cytomegalovirus retinitis had begun robbing Ojeda of his eyesight. He died at New York University Medical Center in 1989, aged 30.

The Cuban-born art critic Ricardo Pau-Llosa was an ahead of time champion, writing: "Ojeda's works, from the onset of his coming on in professional art circles two years ago, possess an assured, subterranean, yet overpowering dynamism of importance. His exploit is unsettling because, in some profound way, beneath the shell of what seems "safe" themes and subject matter, lies an instinctive and intuitive wisdom of art's most critical function: the placing of craft at the advance of altering our sense of the real. This Ojeda does without recourse to the cantankerous and gimmicky cult of pseudo-novelty which has characterized North American, and especially New York, art over the last few years. Ojeda does not objective to explode reality, to denote it later than the flashy pain of art that is more junk than irreverence. Ojeda undermines, rather than ambushes, the boundaries of what we think of as real."

The poet and critic Gerrit Henry wrote: "Facility is buried in purity of vision; style is a means to a highly poetic end. Ojeda's expertise has an underlying severity that arises out of his search for meaning in the cold metropolis– a meaning that may only expose itself for an instant, day or night. Ojeda seems to be upon the spot whenever such a publication occurs."

In 2020, a photograph album of Ojeda's chosen sketches was condensed by Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué (Ojeda's nephew) and Erich Kessel and published by Soberscove Press. An Excess of Quiet: Selected Sketches by Gustavo Ojeda, 1979-1989 was agreed as a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in LGBTQ Nonfiction in 2021.