Rafael Soriano

Rafael Soriano was born on November 23, 1920, in Cidra, Matanzas Province, Cuba. He trained for seven years at the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes San Alejandro in Havana, graduating in 1941 as Professor of Painting, Drawing, and Sculpture. He went on to teach and help found the School of Fine Arts in Matanzas, cementing an early role as both artist and educator in Cuban art. In the 1950s he was associated with Los Diez Pintores Concretos, the Havana-based group at the center of Cuban concrete art, and won gold medals from the Circulo de Bellas Artes and the Galeria de Matanzas in 1957.

Soriano left Cuba and settled in the United States, where he continued to paint and exhibit, and where he eventually became a United States citizen. His American exhibition history includes a first prize at a 1971 invitational show in Miami, an honorable mention at the 1973 Pan American Art Exhibition in Miami, and a first prize in the 1988 to 1989 traveling exhibition Expresiones Hispanicas, organized as part of the Coors National Hispanic Art Exhibit and Tour. Over his lifetime he mounted more than forty solo exhibitions and appeared in over three hundred group shows.

His later work moved from the geometric vocabulary of concrete art toward dreamlike, luminous abstraction, with forms that critics have described as emanating an inner light. In 2011 the Lowe Art Museum at the University of Miami mounted a career retrospective. Work by Soriano entered the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and was later included in the Smithsonian's 2013 national touring exhibition Our America: The Latino Presence in American Art. In 2014 the Cintas Foundation honored him with its Lifetime Achievement Award in the Visual Arts. He died on April 9, 2015, at his home in Miami, Florida, at the age of 94. In 2017 the McMullen Museum of Art at Boston College organized the retrospective Rafael Soriano: The Artist as Mystic, and in 2023 a related exhibition at Casa de America in Madrid made him the first Cuban exile to show at that institution.

Critics have consistently framed Soriano as a pivotal figure bridging Cuban concrete art and a later, more personal visionary abstraction built around light. Reviewing his 2011 retrospective at the Lowe Art Museum, critic Janet Batet discussed how his geometric-period paintings were structured through the interplay of color and plane, and described his mastery of light in the later work. In his essay for the same exhibition, art historian Alejandro Anreus wrote about a pervasive luminosity that unifies Soriano's paintings from the late 1970s onward, an inner light he described as emanating from the forms themselves. That reading, of Soriano as an artist whose formal control of light carries a spiritual or mystical charge, has anchored subsequent institutional treatments of his work, including the McMullen Museum's 2017 retrospective and his 2023 Madrid exhibition.

Soriano's auction market has historically been thin, but it has strengthened notably in recent years. His current auction record is El candor del estio (1990), which sold for USD 126,000 at Christie's New York on February 28, 2025, a result that surpassed his previous record, Fuente Calida (1984), which sold for USD 81,900 at Sotheby's on November 19, 2021. His work is currently presented by more than one gallery, including Hollis Taggart in New York and LnS Gallery in Miami; public sources do not clearly establish a single exclusive representative for the estate. Artnet News has reported that a catalogue raisonne project tied to his estate was being brought forward roughly a decade after his death, though independently confirmed publication details are not yet available.

Soriano's museum presence, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Art Museum of the Americas, the Denver Art Museum, and institutions in Cuba and Colombia, is well established, but his public auction history remains comparatively sparse, so any single result should be read with care rather than as a settled trend line. The status of a full, independently confirmed catalogue raisonne is not yet clear from public reporting, which places extra weight on provenance tied to the Rafael Soriano Foundation and to the galleries, including Hollis Taggart and LnS Gallery, that present the estate's work.