This is a re-imagining of one of Huerta's classic masterworks, that was done in the early 2000's, and was quickly scooped up, by a fortunate collector. It is spectacular work. In our opinion, the detail is far more realized than the painting it was inspired by.
Description - h:40 x w: 30 in - 100 x 75cm.
2023 - oil on canvas
We recently received this painting, and it reaffirms what has long been evident in his work: Victor Huerta Batista is a truly exceptional artist and a singular mind. One of the most compelling aspects of great surrealism is its reliance on symbology, iconography, and an expansive imaginative capacity—qualities that are increasingly rare today. Victor possesses these in abundance. And he is quite a poet. At times it feels like his mind is truly unleashed.
We regard him as both a technical master and a conceptual genius, a combination that is essential to achieving work of this caliber. It is perhaps for this very reason that so few artists successfully operate within the surrealist tradition today. Many demonstrate extraordinary technical ability but lack the imaginative depth to transcend craftsmanship; others possess powerful conceptual vision but lack the technical discipline to fully realize it. Victor is distinguished by the fact that he commands both. Which makes him relatively free of limitation with regard to his paintings.
We have works from Victor dating back nearly 25 years, from the period when we first discovered him. Even then, his conceptual intelligence was unmistakable, though he was still refining his technical execution. Today, he has reached a level of maturity where both elements—conceptual depth and technical mastery—are fully and confidently realized. The reaction his work elicits when viewed in the gallery is remarkable. There is an immediate sense of fascination and sustained engagement—an unmistakable response to work that operates on both an intellectual and visceral level.
From Victor Huerta Batista - January 8th, 2025
I believe that the work of every artist who is authentic and transcendent within the history of art shares a fundamental characteristic: the work is inseparable from lived experience. Each carries a story that must be told. In my own practice, this reflection of personal life is present throughout much of my work.
I was born and have lived in a country that constantly forced my dreams to exist elsewhere in order to be realized. My story mirrors that of my hometown, Camagüey— a place defined by longing, resilience, and imagination shaped by necessity. Those who are inspired, and capable, will create works that endure—works that reflect the totality of their existence.
The clouds that once symbolized winds on old navigation charts have become, in my work, forces that push forward, redirect, and encourage forward movement and the realization of dreams. They are agents of transformation, revealing hidden plans. On another more diabolical level, they can embody the cyclones that return each season, threatening to devastate everything in their path. I come from a place where nothing—without exception—is ever discarded once broken. Everything is reused, reimagined, and set in motion again. We were forced to reinvent ourselves in order to survive.
I collect muses and fairies as fuel for a dreamer—one who seeks to entertain those willing to explore alternate realities. A better life. A different life. A life with more possibilities.
The real world is one thing; the world that exists in my mind has no clear boundaries. Past, present, and future collapse into a single narrative. This is how I tell my story. Every element carries meaning. Nothing is accidental. Together, they form a scene where everything matters. When a work is finished, I become merely a spectator—attempting, like anyone else, to decipher my own impulses, thoughts, and desires.
We will pay domestic shipping, if shipped rolled in a secure tube.
Otherwise, we can ship the work stretched, for our cost of $200 to pack and ship. If shipped internationally, it will be shipped rolled in a secure tube.
Permanent collections:
University of Arizona Museum of Art, Tucson, Arizona, Tucson Museum of Art, Tucson, Arizona
Estremadura Museum of Art, Estremadura, Spain
Extracted from an article in Tucson Weekly, on August 23, 2007, written by Margaret Regan:
In "Caerse de Habana" (The Fall of Havana), 2002, three old men are struggling to hold up a figure above their bald heads. They're decrepit caryatids long past their prime, but then so is the strongman they're trying to support. He's a fake, his body made of wood, pegged together at the joints, and he's collapsing. But Huerta's vision is too wild, too erotic--and too much fun--to be reined in by a single interpretation tied to contemporary politics. Elephant-headed old folks dance on a gargantuan pink birthday cake in "Feliz Cumpleaños" (Happy Birthday), 2003, just beyond a giant snake slithering in the hay around it. Above, the heads of four angry gods blow the small brushfire atop the cake into a conflagration. In other works, a tiny family sits on the precipice of a stove, just past a pot of boiling ship. A sexy woman with a cat's head writhes all naked on the shoulders of a man with a dog's head. Workmen on scaffolding lazily touch up the paint job on the face of a giant man.
Huerta practices what the Cubans call "lo real maravilloso" (the marvelous real), a counterpart to the magical realism in Latin-American literature. He counterbalances the realistic and the fantastic, placing recognizable figures, landscapes and buildings in impossible settings. He plays with imbalances of scale--see that mini-family on the stovetop--and "irrational space," juxtaposing sailing teacups with sailing ships.
Beautifully rendered in acrylics on canvas, his paintings are meant to look like oils, says Lisa Fischman, University Of Arizona Museum of Art curator. Even to the point that he's faked the sheen of oil glaze on top. He paints in a limited Old World palette, in browns, golds, yellows and ambers, with jolts of pale blue or red here and there. Some passages are thinly stained with color, while others have deft layerings of thick paint. Occasionally, Huerta allows paint to drip vertically all across the canvas, like rain, or tears.
The landscape of Cuba, often a backdrop to the fantastic goings-on, emerges in soft, blurry rows of palm trees and glints of light on rooftops. The sea greens of the Straits of Florida shimmer, and sunset skies turn chalky yellow.
The Old Masters can take credit for some of Huerta's wildness. His crazy machines have their roots in Leonardo da Vinci's drawings of flying contraptions, moving dykes, pulleys and cranks. Huerta's fantastic creatures, half-human, half-animal, and his apocalyptic visions owe a debt to Hieronymus Bosch. And his imagination, Fischman says, follows the free flights of Francisco Goya.
Which is how Huerta's works came to be displayed at the UAMA. Fischman and assistant curator Susannah Maurer were looking for a contemporary artist to pair with the second installment of the museum's four-part Goya etchings series. Last spring, works by Tucson rodeo photographer Louise Serpa went up next door to Goya's La Tauromaquia suite of bullfighting prints. This second Goya show, now on view, exhibits 24 etchings from Los Disparates, which the museum translates as "mad and absurd ideas", along with 20 paintings by Victor Huerta Batista. Filled with grotesque monsters, dreamlike phantoms and humans with bats' wings, the nightmare Disparates images are bathed in darkness. Goya worked on these pictures at the end of his life, and scholars have debated whether they represent his fears of death, or his horror at the catastrophic wars of his lifetime, or something else altogether. In any case, the curators thought, rightly, that Huerta's unruly work was a good match. They found his work via the MLA Gallery in Los Angeles, which handles his work and acted as intermediary. Huerta has had some success in Cuba, but this is the first time his extravagant visions have won a museum show in the United States.
"His imagination is unloosed," Fischman says. "He's an artist willing to see where that goes. That's a precedent that Goya set."
Correspondence: In Relation to Goya paintings by Victor Huerta Batista
Goya's Mastery in Prints: Los Disparates
University of Arizona Museum of Art, through Sept. 30th, 2007
Excerpts, and paintings on loan courtesy of MLA Gallery
For more info call us at (323) 792-3779, or to see a greater selection of the gallery work, please visit our Artnet site at: