Yoel Díaz Gálvez

Yoel Díaz Gálvez is a Cuban artist who was born in 1979.

Yoel Díaz Gálvez graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in San Alejandro in 1998. He worked pedagogically as a professor of drawing from life and artistic anatomy at said academy. Currently, he lives and works in Guadalajara, Mexico.

His artistic career has earned him various awards, since 1999 with the 1st prize for painting at the Flora Hall in the city of Havana; in 2006 he won 1st place in the painting category at the Lilly Oncology on Canvas in London, UK, and in 2012 when he received 1st place at the 5th Grupo Reforma Show in Guadalajara, Mexico. Likewise, he has had several honorable mentions in different competitions in Mexico and Spain.

Yoel Díaz Gálvez memorized the God’s greatest creation, man. He learned it inside and out, with a vital, muscular, nervous passion. As a premature artist, he did not waste time and with each stroke he dedicated himself to art in an irreversible sacrifice, living like everyone else, he wanted to talk about life, his own and as an artist, finally, everyone’s. Yoel entered that country where everything that exists is art. I don’t know what that place is like, but I can feel it when I’m in front of his work.

Yoel knows very well what he is talking about, he is being born and dying every day, in each painting. Wanting to open on the outside, he closes on the inside, he spits them out, pushes them, makes them at home, banishes them. He knows where the border is, because the Although he is in Mexico, he is also in another country, the country of art and he is a citizen by merit of humanity and his drawings are witnesses of it. Now he is in the country he wants to reach, and he paints for everyone, no matter where they come from.

The recurring theme of his work around the human body has been a pillar to develop a solid and personal painting within the contemporary figurative; having a large number of personal and collective exhibitions that have been developed in important spaces of galleries and museums such as the Casa Diego Rivera Museum, the Long Beach Latin American Art Museum as well as the European Museum of Modern Art in Barcelona where his work integrates the permanent collection. His work has been awarded prizes in various competitions and is in important state and private art collections.