Almine Rech Gallery, London
Agustín Cárdenas in his studio, 1965 / Courtesy of the Estate of the Artist and Almine Rech Gallery. Photo: © Martine Franck / Magnum Photos
Almine Rech Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition of Agustín Cárdenas, opening June 5th, 2018. The exhibition will consist of rarely shown sculpture spanning fifty years of the 20th century master’s career, from 1947 to 1997.
Agustín Cárdenas was born in Matanzas, Cuba in 1927 and died in Havana, Cuba, in 2001. After his studies at the Academia de Bellas Artes San Alejandro in Cuba and a solo exhibition at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Havana, Cuba, in 1955 he moved to Paris. There he met André Breton, who invited him to participate in a group exhibition at the Surrealist gallery l’Étoile Scellée, and in 1959 presented his first solo exhibition at the Galerie La Cour d’Ingres. In France Cárdenas was made a Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters, and in the US he was a receiver of the William and Noma Copley Foundation Award.
As well as in Cuba and France, Cárdenas worked in Canada, Austria, Japan, Italy, Israel and Korea. Between 1956 and 2012, Cárdenas took part in over a hundred group exhibitions, and was the focus of some forty monographic exhibitions internationally at institutions such as at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Havana, in 1993, at the Fondation Nationale des Arts Graphiques et Plastiques, Paris, in 1981, and at the Galerie de France et du Benelux, Brussels, in 1974.
Works by Cárdenas are part of important private and institutional collections, such as the Centre Pompidou and the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in Paris, the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome, the Modern Art Museum in Tel Aviv, Palazzo delle Stelline in Milan, and the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique in Brussels.
Coinciding with the exhibition, a catalogue and an essay by Mark Rappolt will be published.
