Romanian-born Sandú Darié immigrated permanently to Havana in 1941, escaping the war in Paris where he had been studying. He is considered one of the foremost revolutionary Concrete artists, a movement that characterized the decade of the 1950s in Cuba. Although his early works reflected an expressionist tendency, Darié soon turned to geometric abstraction. In 1952, along with Mario Carreño and Luis Martínez Pedro, he founded the magazine Noticias de Arte—used as a platform to promote abstraction within Cuban modernism—quickly accelerating the consolidation of the Concrete movement.

The present lot, with its mechanical construction and moving parts, is a masterful example of Darié’s novel style. As aptly elucidated by Abigail McEwen, Darié “challenges the fixity of line and color, directing their movement dynamically beyond the frame, implicitly displacing art into life” (Abigail McEwen, Concrete Cuba – Cuban Geometric Abastraction from the 1950s, New York, 2015, p. 7). Imbued with a geometric rigor reminiscent of Piet Mondrian’s Neoplasticism, this elegant work compels viewers to engage with its movable components to create various star bursts of black and white. Untitled (from the series ‘Formas geométricas móviles') is a masterwork that definitively denotes the pioneering theoretical scope of Cuban Concretism.