Agustín Cárdenas (Alfonzo) was born on April 10, 1927 in Matanzas, Cuba. The son of a tailor and the descendant of slaves from Congo and Senegal, Cárdenas pursued art from a young age. In 1943, at the age of 16 Cárdenas moved from his home in Matanzas, a former major port city in the slave and sugar trade, to the bustling capital city, Havana. In Havana, he attended the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes “San Alejandro” studying under the master sculptor Juan José Sicre, renowned for his monumental marble sculptures. For the next six years Cárdenas would begin to hone his craft and familiarize himself with the mediums he would later master. Post-graduation, Cárdenas involved himself with various art groups most notably Los Once (The Eleven), comprised of painters and sculptors who rejected conventional art practices and exposed Cárdenas to more experimental art methodologies. Cárdenas’s involvement in the Havana art scene led to his inclusion in the group exhibition “Plastica Cubana Contemporanea” at the Lyceum, a prominent cultural center in Havana, in 1954, and his first solo exhibition “Exposición Agustín Cárdenas: 20 Esculturas” in 1955 at Palacio de Bellas Artes.
A burgeoning interest in more avant-garde art methods led him to migrate to Paris in 1955 where he found camaraderie with famed French writer and poet André Breton and surrealist artists Constantin Brancusi, and Salvador Dali. During this time, Cárdenas began incorporating elements from the West African Dogon tradition into his art, creating wooden totems with elongated abstracted forms, a practice he would continue throughout his career. In May of 1956, as Cárdenas settled in the Montparnasse neighborhood of Paris, André Breton’s prominent gallery, l’Étoile Scellée, invited him to exhibit alongside fellow Cuban artist Fayad Jamís. Before closing in June of the same year, l’Étoile Scellée welcomed the likes of Max Ernst, Man Ray, and Meret Oppenheim, cementing a 29 year old Cárdenas among some of the most renowned contemporary artists of the 20th century. For the next few years he continued to exhibit his sculptures around Paris in both group shows and solo exhibitions, and in 1961, participated in the Paris Biennale, winning first prize in sculpture.
While finding success in the Paris art scene, in 1962 Cárdenas married a Latvian and Italian multilingual interpreter named Elena Ianotta, whom he met two years prior. In the same year, their first son Arlen was born, followed by Solano, Timour, André, and Fernando. In 1968 he moved his family from the center of Paris to the southwestern suburb Meudon, establishing a studio there and a second in Nogent-sur-Marne, a eastern suburb. Cárdenas frequented Carrara, the Italian town well known for its quarries of highly sought-after white and blue grey marble, which he regularly used as the medium for his sculptures. Along with Carrara marble he continued to sculpt in wood and bronze, employing elegant curves and elongated silhouettes to skillfully communicate both physical and metaphysical forms and ideas. Additionally, numerous works on paper were created, many existing as studies for later sculptural works and containing two-dimensional examples of the same themes.
After decades living in France, in 1994 Cárdenas fell ill and returned to Havana, Cuba where he remained until his death in 2001. Agustín Cárdenas is buried in the Montparnasse cemetery in Paris and is survived by his sons. During his lifetime he was celebrated for his contributions to the global art community receiving the William and Noma Copley Foundation Award for visual arts in 1964 and 1995 the Cuban National Fine Arts Award, alongside sculptor Rita Longa. Throughout his career he traveled extensively and from 1956 to 1997 he participated in approximately 100 group exhibitions and 34 solo exhibitions located around the world. Cárdenas’s commissions and exhibitions took him to Canada, Austria, Japan, Israel, South Korea, Germany, The United States, and Italy. His works are also in the permanent collections of many prestigious institutions globally, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Centre Pompidou in Paris, and Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de Cuba.