Agustín Cárdenas was born in Matanzas, Cuba in 1927. He began modeling forms in clay and then sculpture at the San Alejandro National Academy of Fine Arts in Havana, where he studied from 1943 to 1949.It was also then that Cárdenas discovered the work of Hans Arp, Constantin Brancusi, and Henry Moore.Working with wood, marble, and bronze, he developed poetic, curved, and sensual works in which organic generosity, elongated silhouettes, and abstract forms all mix together.  Cárdenas work is characterized by a skillful mixture of abstraction and figuration.

Cárdenas is considered one of the forerunners of modern abstract sculpture, on a par with Constantin Brancusi and Jean Arp.He belongs to the last group of the Surrealists, and together with them he holds many exhibitions. He traveled to Paris in 1955 and the following year he was invited by the esthete of Surrealism Andrés Bretón to participate in an collective exhibition in the gallery of the surrealist group L’Etoile Scelle.Between 1956 and 1997, Cárdenas took part in around a hundred group exhibitions and thirty-four solo exhibitions.He was made a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres and awarded the Bill and Noma Copley prize.From 1968,he lived and worked regularly in Meudon-Bellevue and in his studio in Nogent-sur-Marne.

The sensual lyricism of Agustín Cárdenas sculptures, inherited from African myths and the primitivism of the origins, is mixed with animist rituals and gives his work a universal scope.Between zoomorphism and anthropomorphism, the masculine and the feminine, his work revolves around the notion of hybridity and brings together different notions through a unique aesthetic charged with sensuality.It is a renewal of the surrealist language given by the incorporation of figurative features of the Afro-Cuban cultural Syncretism.