Tomás Sánchez

Life and work

Tomás Sánchez was born on 22 May 1948 in Aguada de Pasajeros, in the province of Cienfuegos, Cuba. He moved to Havana at sixteen and studied at the San Alejandro academy from 1964, then at the newly founded Escuela Nacional de Arte, graduating in 1971. He stayed on at the school as a professor of engraving and lithography, and the printmaker's discipline never left the painting. In 1980 he took first prize at the nineteenth Joan Miró International Drawing Prize in Barcelona, which opened the door to Europe, and in 1984 he won the painting prize at the first Havana Biennial. His first retrospective came at the National Museum of Fine Arts in Havana in 1985. He left Cuba in 1989 for Mexico, then for southern Florida, and joined Marlborough Gallery in 1996. He now lives and works between Costa Rica and Miami. The monograph published on him in 2003 carried an essay by Gabriel García Márquez.

Disciplines and how they differ

Two bodies of work run in parallel and they do not price alike. The first is the meditative landscape: a lagoon, a waterfall, a bank of cloud, often with a single small seated figure, painted in acrylic on canvas with a miniaturist's finish. The second, begun in the early 1980s, is the landfill, vast grey fields of rubbish painted with the same precision. The landscapes carry the market. Beneath both sits a large graphic output of lithographs, screenprints and recent UV pigment prints issued in editions of several hundred, and it is this last category that LLB Auction has handled. All eight lots offered here have been prints, lithographs or screenprints, and half of them sold, every one at the same modest hammer price.

What a specialist examines

Canvases are normally signed and dated at the lower right and signed again, titled and dated on the reverse, and the houses that have catalogued them record both inscriptions. The reverse is worth photographing in full. Supports vary more than the finish suggests. Acrylic on canvas is the standard, but oil on canvas and casein on board both appear in catalogued lots. On prints the numbering matters, as does the publisher's paper, the 2025 editions being printed on Somerset. Condition points are the ordinary ones for a thinly and evenly worked acrylic surface: stretcher marks, surface dirt and any retouching, all of which read against a ground this smooth. No body that reviews works for sellers is listed under Career, so the paperwork a seller holds carries the weight.

Market position

The record sits with the large canvases. At Phillips in New York in July 2020 Meditador, painted in 1995, made USD 399,000. A small canvas of 1994, Orilla de La Mañana, made USD 47,500 at the same house in March 2020. Lower down the scale a casein on board of 1990 made USD 14,080 at Bonhams in New York in February 2025. The print market is another world: the 2025 UV pigment print El testigo, from an edition of 425, made GBP 625 at Tate Ward in London in June 2026, close to what the same image realises here. Each figure includes the buyer's premium as the house prints it.

What a seller should have ready

Any signed paperwork the artist supplied with the work, since buyers at the upper end expect the file to be complete. Photographs of the face, of the whole reverse, and of the signature and the inscription in close detail. Exact dimensions in centimetres and the medium, distinguishing acrylic from oil and canvas from board. For prints, the edition number, the publisher and any blindstamp. Purchase invoices or gallery correspondence, especially anything from Marlborough. And a note of whether the work is a landscape or comes from the landfill series, because the two are bought by different people.