Agustín Cárdenas

Galerie de France et du Benelux, Brussels (acquired by 1977)

Private Collection, Belgium (acquired from the above)

Sotheby's, New York, 29 June 2020, lot 134 (consigned by the above)

Acquired from the above by the present owner

Brussels, Galerie de France et du Benelux, Cárdenas, 1977, no. 28, n.p., illustrated

Born in Matanzas, Cuba in 1927 to formerly enslaved parents from Senegal and the Congo, Agustín Cárdenas moved to Havana to enter the acclaimed San Alejandro Academy of Fine Art in 1943. He relocated to Paris in 1955 on a government scholarship, and was quickly invited by André Breton to exhibit his sinewy, biomorphic wood sculptures alongside the Surrealists, with whom he shared an interest in subconscious desire and the occult. Like his countryman and fellow Surrealist Wifredo Lam, he also became involved in the négritude Pan-Africanist movement, examining aspects of shared cultural and spiritual heritage across the African diaspora in Europe and the Americas. Cárdenas’ simultaneous engagement with these two schools led to a fruitful and nuanced interrogation of their ideas around identity and the subconscious, and tensions between African and European spiritualities and ways of relating to the natural world, in his mature body of work. 

In 1961, now well-established in Paris, Cárdenas exhibited his first series of sculptures in marble at Galerie du Dragon in Paris. This emergent body of work marked a key shift in the artist’s focus from the forgiving wood and plaster of his early career towards a fascination with marble, and a subsequent mastery of this chosen discipline. Two years later he would relocate to Carrara, Italy, joining the growing community of modernist sculptors working at the marble quarries there. Executed in 1976, L’Eau se déplie (Water unfolds) belongs to this celebrated, mature body of work. Cárdenas professed a fascination for the cold, otherworldly quality that marble leant to his organic forms. That contradiction is elegantly embodied in L’Eau se déplie, in which one might see a single drop of water that cascades and echoes around itself in rhythmic rivulets. Its gleaming surface and evanescent form, constantly changing with the viewer’s perspective and the shifting light of day, are emblematic of the Cuban sculptor’s ability to render emotional depth from purely abstract imagery. 

Cárdenas continued working until his passing in 2001; he is buried in Montparnasse Cemetery in Paris. His work has been the focus of some forty monographic exhibitions worldwide, and his work is held in the permanent collections of both the Centre Pompidou and the Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris in France, as well as the Museums of Modern Art in Rome, Caracas, Algiers, New York, and Montréal, and many others.