Amy Bravo: Well Done Assassin

Amy Bravo is a New York based artist of Cuban Italian origin. Her works combine symbolism—stylised palm trees, roosters, horses and waxed mustaches—artifacts from Latin American religious and popular culture and family stories, to create her own intimate and imaginative vision of the island of Cuba, a mixture of the familiar and the unknown, of beauty and bewilderment. She has an unconventional approach to painting, preferring irregular shaped canvasses to the classic stretcher forms, and mixing black and coloured pencil drawings with various other disciplines such as painting and collage using materials such as string, leather, dried leaves and lace amongst other diverse objects drawn from her personal and family history. This very particular combination of techniques, where pride of place is given to DIY and popular culture, fits in perfectly with the intentions of her work: to bring together complex identities, to rebuild a family lineage interrupted by exile, to reimagine her ancestral home and to sketch the outlines of a mythical world. Thus, her works have given birth to a rural community populated by Amazons, women wrestlers and cowgirls; proud and liberated women at the crossroads of the three communities asserted by the artist: Women, Brown and Latinx.