Misleidys Castillo Pedroso Cuban, b. 1985

Misleidys was born with brain, hearing and autistic impediments. She has always lived in her own secluded world, inserted in a familiar environment. Painting with watercolors and pencils has been her great passion since early childhood.

Over time, the sketching of muscular male figures with hard facial features has become central to her work. Gradually these figures she colors, cuts and pastes on the wall have acquired a large format –even bigger than the actual human size– and can be looked at as sculptures.
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Her father left home when she was a young kid. As a result, she acquired a rather particular vision of masculinity: a caricatured stereotype of the super strong and muscular man who marks his anatomy extending his arms up and down. These burly characters wear tiny laced underpants with the letter "E" inscribed inside a heart, or else they have been stripped of all clothing.

In this way, Misleidys breaks with convention and inscribes her work in the contemporary debate around genre: she highlights the absence of male nudes throughout art history (except for the representations of the great gods of classical mythology) and the prevalence of the female nude body.