Sandú Darié

Prophet of Concretism

Sandú Darié c. 1950s, photo courtesy Museo Nacional de la Havana Archives


A leading figure of Concretism in Latin America, Sandú Darié emigrated from his home country of Romania to Paris in the 1930s and would eventually take up Cuban nationality after moving to Havana in 1941. In 1946, Darié joined the Argentinian-based Concretist art group Madí, and would become known as "the prophet of Concretism" by some of his fellow painters. From 1959 to 1961, Darié was among Los Diez Pintores Concretos (The Ten Concrete Painters), a short-lived collective that emerged from the social transformations of mid-century Cuba and Latin America. Several of Darié's "transformable structures" and "pictorial structures" were included in the 2016 David Zwirner exhibition Concrete Cuba. As the gallery explained, "Los Diez sought a universal, utopian aesthetic that, in its purported political circumspection, offered a new form of political and social engagement."