To mark the first edition of the MIRA Art Fair, Galerie Mitterrand is delighted to present Mon Ombre Après Minuit by Agustín Cárdenas, a 2.5-metre-high sculpture that will be installed in the gardens of the Maison de l'Amérique Latine from 18 to 22 September 2024.
Mon Ombre Après Minuit (1963), in bronze cast from the original wood sculpture, is intended as a self-portrait of the artist. Flat and frontal, with angular contours and punctuated by flared and rounded areas, the work raises questions of identity linked to the artist's Afro-Cuban origins, as well as to the genesis of his work. Indeed, the material, technique and formal characteristics reveal Cárdenas's interest in non-Western sculpture, particularly that of the Dogon culture of West Africa. The title of the work seems to derive from a surrealist game combining plastic and verbal processes, a common practice in this movement, by which the viewer or artist gives a subjective response to the finished work.
‘Midnight makes the shadows disappear, but their association in the title of the sculpture combines the surrealist tropes of the double and the nocturnal realm, both intrinsically linked to the unconscious, at the heart of surrealist thought and iconography as well as the source of their creation.’ — Susan Power
Agustín Cárdenas was born in Matanzas, Cuba in 1927. His work embodies his Latin- American and African origins, its strong symbolism and extreme liberty frees it from their respective references. Working with wood, marble and bronze, the artist developed a poetic, curved and sensual body of work that combines organic generosity, elongated silhouettes and abstract forms. The abstraction of his formal grammar is almost always counterbalanced by a figurative representation suggested by the titles he chooses. Totems, shells, women, couples, horses, doors, steles... so many subjects populated with symbols that give the artist pretexts for conjugating the verb to create, through a variety of forms. His works can be found in numerous museum collections, including the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, the Museo d'Arte Moderna in Rome, the Museo d'Arte Moderno in Caracas, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Museo Nacional in Cuba, the Modern Art Museum in Tel Aviv, and The Hakone open-air Museum in Japan.
