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Agustin Cardenas (1927)was born in Matanzas, Cuba in 1927 and studied at the Academia de Bellas Artes 'San Alejandro' in Havana from 1943 to 1949. His first individual show was held at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Havana in 1955, and that same year he travailed to Paris on a scholarship. His wood and stone sculptures are biomorphic and expertly realized, provocatve both intellectually and sensually. The affinity that the surrealists felt for his work led to his first exhibition there, at the Galerie L'Etoile Scellle in 1956. Since then Cardenas has been exhibited widely in Europe, the Americas, and Asia. At the Biennale de Paris in 1961 he was awarded the prize in sculpture. Among his many individual shows have been FIAC, Paris (1980,1984); Museo de Bellas Artes, Caracas (1982); International Gallery, Chicago (1990). His works appear in many museum and private collections, including Fond National d'Art Contemporain, Montreal; Museum of Modern Art, Tel Aviv; Hakone Museum, Japan; Museo de Bellas Artes, Caracas; Musee d'Art Moderne de la ville de Paris. Cardenas has lived in Paris since 1955, and works in Paris and Carrara, Italy. Under the auspices of the magazine, Avance, the First Exhibition of Modern Art was held in Havanna. The magazine cheered on the changes of direction taken by the plastic arts in a context that Marinello defined as the “critical decade”. Since his days at the San Alejandro Academy, the “master of masters” of Cuban sculpture, Juan José Sicre, recognized in Cárdenas the vigor and creative imagination that accompanied him throughout his career, from his early work at the end of the 1940’s through the experience of “Los Once” to the mature, definitive work of his Parisian period. In 1995 he was awarded the National Prize for the Plastic arts, along with another outstanding Cuban sculptor, Rita Longa. He worked wood, marble and bronze with the same ease and sureness and with a poetic freshness that demonstrated that traditional media are not at odds with each other. He was comfortable dialoging ideologically with Brancusi or Henry Moore, with all the vitality afforded by an island whose sense of itself derives from its creative involvement in the linguistic codes of contemporaneity. Cárdenas’ impeccably finished, imaginative and truly poetic
work has a parallel in painting in the work of another great Cuban artist,
Wilfredo Lam.
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