Alejandro Lazo is a self-taught painter born in Havana in 1970. He began painting in 1986 at the age of 16 as part of the atelier in the Adolfo Delgado cultural center in the San Agustin neighborhood in La Lisa, on the outskirts of Havana. When he finished high school he became a member of an artists' group at the Domingo Ravenet Gallery in La Lisa, and for the next three years exhibited as a part of several group and personal shows.

In 1991 he was accepted to become part of the "independent artist register" at the Fondos de Bienes Culturales (the Cultural Patrimony Fund), which operates as a government artists' agency) and began participating in a new series of exhibits in Cuba and abroad. He was only 21 at the time. At the same time he was developing his own unique style, he earned money illustrating research works and scientific articles relating to medical anthropology and rheumatology, some of which were published abroad.

Lazo has been exhibited often in the United States, including one-man exhibits at the Cuban Art Space, in 2000 and in 2005. When he exhibited in the 1999 "Malerefun" exhibit, a group show curated by the Center for Cuban Studies, the Yale art historian Robert Farris Thompson, an invited speaker at the exhibition, compared Lazo's work to that of José Bedia, and could not leave without purchasing one of his paintings for his own collection. Since then Lazo's intensity and richness of color, symbol and texture has grown and deepened. For the last five years he has been living in Spain outside of Barcelona. He is the father of a five year old son, Saúl.

(Biographical information courtesy of the Cuban Art Space, Center for Cuban Studies, in New York, which loaned us work for our 2009 show:
Visiones 2: New Art from Cuba.)