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Email PageManolo Valdés: Recent Sculpture and Painting
February 7, 2008- March 8, 2008
Manolo Valdés
Marlborough Chelsea
545 W 25th St Manolo Valdès Perfil con sombrero carmin (2007) |
Impassioned by artists of the past ranging from Zurbarán to Velázquez, Matisse to Lichtenstein, Valdés finds more than just inspiration in their paintings; he uses their work “as a pretext” (“como pretexto”) to create an entirely new aesthetic object - a painting or sculpture that while clearly sourced from an known composition is a uniquely brilliant work of art in itself.
Noted art historian Alfonso E. Pérez Sánchez commented on Valdés approach in his essay for the catalogue that accompanied the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia's retrospective of Valdés' work in 2006: “The technique of Manolo Valdés' painting is a collection of daring experiments, a frenzied culmination of everything that has been done previously with texture experimentation and the free combination of expressive media. …Manolo Valdés is a magician. Using sackcloth, mended rags with ragged threads left in plain view as if by mistake, and dense oil paints he creates himself, … he is able to present us with an image that takes the shape of the models he uses 'as a pretext' with energy and supreme vigour. …It is a personal world, containing subtle traces of what he admires, but transported in an admirable transmutation to the turbulent times we live in, with all the anxious confusion of modernity.”
A highlight of the exhibition will be Arielle sobre fondo azul, 2007 (90 x 74 in., 228.6 x 187.9 cm), a brilliantly colorful portrait inspired by an early Matisse painting that perfectly encapsulates Valdés' approach. With a deep rose hat, orange blouse and cobalt blue background, Valdés' Fauve-like colors concentrate the expression of the female's face, an elegantly delineated cipher of bowed lips, arched brows and black eyes that one reads through a patchwork of fabric and paint strokes, fractured and fragmented yet unmistakably the visage of a woman. A Matisse painting is also the pretext for La Dama India sobre fondo naranja y azul, 2007 (90 x 74 in., 228.6 x 187.9 cm), while a Renaissance drawing by an unknown hand is the pretext for a series of large paintings of figures in profile. A work by Max Beckmann was the pretext for Valdés' sophisticated still-lifes of tulips in a vase placed on a striped tablecloth.
The sculptures in the exhibition, ranging in height from seventeen inches to almost seven feet, depict a number of heads and figures in bronze and iron, including an imposing head entitled La Mascara, 2007 (79 x 48 x 38 in., 200.6 x 121.9 x 96.5 cm), which translates as “mask” in English, and a number of smaller sculptures inspired by the work of Paul Klee. Ariadna, 2007 (64 x 45 x 40 in., 162.5 x 114.3 x 101.6 cm), completed in wood and iron, depicts a serene female head with a wreath of metal spiraling outward and upward with infinite grace. Valdés is one of the few contemporary artists who has successfully mastered the disciplines of drawing, painting, sculpture and lithography. Born in Valencia, Spain in 1942 he began his training as a painter at the age of fifteen when he entered the Fine Arts Academy of San Carlos in Valencia where he spent two years. In 1964 Valdés along with with Rafael Solbes and Joan Toledo formed an artistic team called Equipo Cronica. Toledo soon left the association but Valdés and Solbes continued to collaborate until Solbes' premature death in 1981. American and British Pop Art had a strong influence on the artists and encouraged them to use their own impersonal pop style to experiment with format, image appropriation and social and political references, specifically to the dictatorship of Franco. Following Solbes' death, Valdés reinvented himself creating the paradoxically muscular and refined expressive style centered on art-historical motifs that he continues to explore today. Valdés lives and works in New York and Madrid.
Currently The City of Miami Beach is presenting an exhibition of Valdés' monumental sculpture, featuring nine works in bronze and iron, including four sculptures depicting female heads, their calm facial composure and structured equilibrium offset rhythmically by dynamic ornamental head-pieces. On the “Greenway” at Washington Avenue, this show will continue to through February 28, 2008. Concurrently an extensive traveling exhibition of Valdés' sculpture is on view in Sevilla, Spain. Entitled Arte en la Calle, Manolo Valdés: Escultura Monumental, the show of fifteen works is sponsored by Fundación “la Caixa,” and will continue to Bilbao and then Barcelona through June 15, 2008, ending a seven-city tour. In the early spring of 2007, New York City Parks & Recreation, Bryant Park Corporation, Instituto Cervantes, and Marlborough Gallery held Manolo Valdés at Bryant Park, an exhibition of monumental bronze sculptures that featured six works arranged amongst Bryant Park's beautifully scaled open space and neo-classical architecture.
In 2005, a large exhibition of Valdés' sculptures of both Infanta Margarita and Reina Mariana opened to critical acclaim at the Palais Royal, Paris, then traveled to Switzerland and Spain. In 2006, several of these sculptures were featured at the Desert Botanical Garden in Arizona, the first West Coast venue for Valdés' work. Most recently, a group of Las Meninas were on view during the Helsinki Festival in Finland, from May-September 2, 2007. In 2002, as part of Parks & Recreation's public art program, Valdés exhibited a monumental bronze sculpture entitled La Dama on Park Avenue.
Valdés completed two of his most important commissions to date in 2003: three monumental bronze sculptures, Las Damas de Barajas, which were created for Madrid's highly acclaimed new international airport, and La Dama del Manzanares, which presides majestically over Madrid's Parque del Mazanares and is his largest sculpture at forty-five-feet high. In 1999, Valdés was the official representative of Spain at the Venice Biennale. Recent retrospectives of Valdés' paintings, sculpture and graphic work have been held at the Guggenheim Bilbao in 2002 and Madrid's Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in 2006. An important solo exhibition at the Fondation Maeght in Saint-Paul, France, was also held in 2006. In 2007, Valdés became an Officier de l'Ordre National du Mérite, France, one of the highest cultural honors in that country.
Two important exhibitions of Valdés' painting and sculpture will be held in 2008 at The State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg, from May through August and the National Art Museum of China, Beijing from October through November. Valdés' work may be found in more than forty public collections, including the following: Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, Italy; Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg, Germany; Menil Foundation, Houston, Texas; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Modern Museet Art, Stockholm, Sweden; Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France; Museo Nacional Centre de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas; and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts and The Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York.
Books and DVDs related to artists in this show
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