Mai 36 Galerie is delighted to present the works of Cuban painter Michel Pérez Pollo. The gallery hosted his first solo exhibition in 2014, following on from his inclusion in a 2012 group show featuring fellow artists Flavio Garciandía and Raúl Cordero.

Michel Pérez Pollo (*1981 in Manzanillo/Cuba, lives and works in Havana) creates his works in two stages: first, he makes a model of clay and found objects, which serves as a template for his painting in the second stage. Pérez Pollo always works on two levels: a painted area in the lower third of the picture acts as a base for the seemingly three-dimensional form in the foreground. The resulting figurative situations and sculptural portraits have a surreal and poetic effect.

The title Uqbar, chosen to highlight this exhibition at Mai 36 Galerie, refers to a short story by the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges: „Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius“, in which the author describes an imaginary place, planet or land by the name of Uqbar - a place of mountains and rivers, with its own laws, literature, philosophy and so on. The boundaries between the fictitious world of Uqbar and the real world become blurred in the course of the story, to the point at which no distinction can be made between reality and fiction.