Manolo Valdés
Takes Velázquez, Matisse and Rembrandt apart and rebuilds them in burlap, wood and bronze.
Manolo Valdés was born in Valencia in 1942 and in 1964 co-founded Equipo Crónica, a collective that used Pop art techniques against the Franco regime by re-editing the canonical images of Spanish art. Since the group ended in 1981 he has worked alone, on a practice built entirely from quotation: the Infantas of Las Meninas, Matisse's odalisques, Rembrandt's and Rubens's heads, remade at large scale in burlap, sacking, hessian, wood, alabaster and bronze, with the material left visibly rough. He has worked in New York since 1989 and his monumental heads have been installed in public spaces across Europe and the Americas.
The output spans painting, mixed-media relief and sculpture, and the sculptures exist in numbered editions, often in more than one size and material, so the edition, the dimensions and the material together identify a work rather than the image doing so. Monumental outdoor pieces are a separate category from the gallery-scale casts of the same subject. The burlap and mixed-media works are unique and their surfaces are fragile. Signature and number are usually incised or stamped, and studio documentation is the reference.
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