13 November - 13 December 2020
Cecilia Brunson Projects
2G Royal Oak Yard
Bermondsey Street
SE1 3GD
Cecilia Brunson Projects is excited to present Concretos, an online exhibition of seven artists from the mid-century Cuban artist collective Los Diez Pintores Concretos [Ten Concrete Painters].
Los Diez was active from 1958 to 1961 and centred on the Galería Color-Luz, Havana. This short-lived movement of geometric abstraction in Cuba coincided with the flowering of Concrete abstraction across Latin America in the middle of the twentieth century. This new art form – variously described as “concrete”, “constructivist”, or “constructed” art – was intended to reflect autonomous, novel realities pertinent to individual contexts, aesthetic traditions, and local concerns. Committed to advancing a rigorous, non-objective form of art defined by rational structure, mechanical order, and abstract geometry, these pioneers sought to create a universal visual language free of borders and the rhetoric of early twentieth-century modernism.
This selection of thirteen works on paper and two paintings includes important works from 1940 through to 1970 by seven artists who were at different times associated with Los Diez Pintores Concretos: Mario Carreño (1913-1999), Salvador Corratgé (1928 – 2014), Sandú Darié (1908-1991), Luis Martínez Pedro (1910-2010), José M. Mijares (1921-2004), Pedro de Oraá (1931-2020), and Loló Soldevilla (1901-1971).
Two iconic Sandú Darié works shown here demonstrate the basic tenets of Concrete art – a combination of planes, primary colours and form fused with geometric rigor. Atardecer en Rojo incorporates Mario Carreño’s signature crescent and triangular forms that recall Afro-Cuban motifs into European Modernist style. Luis Martínez Pedro’s pivotal Aguas Territoriales marks a poignant end to Cuba’s Concrete movement in the early 1960s. The concentric blue forms are Pedro’s suggestion to the movement of island waters at a time when Cuba was under siege and surveillance, during the height of the US-Soviet missile crisis in Cuba.
While Los Diez continues to be historically evaluated in relation to the revolutionary upheaval of 1960s Cuba, they made immeasurable contributions to the history of abstraction in Cuba, and to mid-century Latin American art.