The Empress
Wanda Fraga Sánchez
Wanda Fraga Sánchez de la Campa was born in 1994 in the city of Santa Clara (Cuba), the daughter of a single mother and an emigrant father. Art occupied much of her childhood and was her company, and she accumulated a great number of prizes for an astonishingly profound vision of life. In 2010, Wanda presented her first personal exhibition and graduated several years later from the Professional Academy of Arts. Her work, where man is always contrasted with the social environment, as if it were a fragmented reality, makes definitive contact with her own interiority and reflects the loneliness and feeling of abandonment that have been constant in her life. Presenting fragments of memories, people, situations and objects that have determined her as a person, Wanda alludes to these with the responsibility of sharing them, perhaps seeking to restore that bond that she never felt to have with the world. The artist describes her art as “dialoguing obsessively about her experiences of childhood, what she has seen and experienced as: girl, now woman and human being. From the pain of living on an island surrounded by water, which surrounds but separates at the same time, from growing into a country that is a collage, from cultures to races and influences.” She also explores “the visuality of Bad Painting, Minimal Art and the poster, as well as the presuppositions of Conceptual Art, in search of a technique that is better suited to the emotions she is trying to communicate” and regards the collage as her best starting point and ally in developing her artistry.