Reina Mariana 2004

MANOLO VALDÉS born 1942, Spanish

Reina Mariana 2004

bronze
170.0 x 130.0 x 90.0 cm
signed with initials and numbered to base: MV 1/9

accompanied by a certificate of authenticity from Opera Gallery, Paris
edition: 1/9

Provenance:
Opera Gallery, Paris, 2015
Private collection, Melbourne

Exhibited:
Les Ménines de Valdés, Jardins du Palais Royal, Paris, 6 June - 20 July 2005; Pelikanplatz, Zürich, 25 July - 30 September 2005; Paseo de Los Álamos y Plaza de La Escandalera, Ovideo, October - December 2005 (illus. exhibition catalogue, another example)

Please note that this work can be viewed in Melbourne only.

Estimate: $400000 - 600000

Result Hammer: $400000

Manolo Valdés is one of Spain’s foremost contemporary artists, with an extensive career spanning the last 60 years. Blending the historical and new, original and copy, painting and assemblage, his multidisciplinary practice has explored the synthesis of art history and popular culture. He co-represented Spain in the 1999 Venice Biennale, and has had retrospectives held at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Spain (2002), Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid (2006), and Fondation Maeght, France (2006). His work is held in over forty public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), Centre Pompidou (Paris), Guggenheim Museum (Bilbao and New York), and Museo Reina Sofia (Madrid). From 1999 onwards he has been awarded frequent public art commissions, with large scale permanent or temporary installations exhibited internationally in art capitals Bilbao, New York, Monaco, Paris and Madrid.

Valdés’ career has evolved over two distinctive periods: his time in his native Spain as a member of the artist group Equipo Cronica (1964-1981), and as a solo artist working primarily in New York and Madrid. The one, almost obsessive, through line between these two periods is Valdés’ love for art history. As Equipo Cronica his work contributed to the united artistic front against the Francoist dictatorship, aggregated in the agitprop of the Estampa Popular movement. With fellow collaborators Rafael Solbes and briefly Juan Antonio Toledo, their output combined and flexibly appropriated the propagandistic impulse of Soviet social realism and the laissez-faire imagery of American Pop art through a politically charged and Spanish slanted narration.

Their works were colourful, slickly painted collages and silkscreens of popular imagery and high culture pastiche. Fauvism and futurism, Russian suprematism and pop art; adhered together in energetic tableaus that revolved around the iconography of Spanish artists like El Greco, Pablo Picasso, Francisco Goya, and Diego Velázquez. A notable example is their Guernica (1971); a satirical regurgitation of Roy Lichtenstein’s Whaam! (1963) explosion superimposed over an excerpt of Pablo Picasso’s anti-war painting Guernica (1937). The work served as a reminder of the 1937 war-crime bombardment of the Basque town by Francisco Franco’s Nationalist faction, and America’s convenient indifference to the totalitarian regime during the Cold War.

Equipo Cronica dissolved following Solbes’ death in 1981, leading Valdés to soon pivot towards introspective and less politically driven work as a solo artist. His polished collages were substituted for abstracted compositions comprised of rudimentary materials like burlap, bitumen, leaves, and tape. Instead of drawing from contemporary life like the Pop artists, Valdés’ stimuli was solely the museum – he avidly reinterpreted art historical imagery, namely masters of the Spanish Golden Age and Renaissance. Appropriation remained his modus operandi, yet his refreshed aesthetic was no longer constrained by a direct political motive or commercial format. Francisco Franco’s death and thus the end of his regime contributed to this shift; ‘we were now living in a democracy. We no longer had to fight for things that we had already fought for and achieved.’(1) Liberated from the demands of political resistance; new themes were allowed to flourish.

Moving to New York in 1990, Valdés was enveloped in an environment of artistic rule-breaking inherited from American artists like Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008) or Jackson Pollock (1912-1956). Here he brought the old and new masters together, closely exploring the interface of painting’s burdensome history and the iterative logic of contemporary visual culture. In these paintings, simplified – usually feminine – figures and faces borrowed from Henri Matisse, Velázquez or Filippo Lippi emerge in patchworked layers of hessian and other throwaway materials, painted roughly and eschewing the traditional practices of oil painting. By recycling deeply historical imagery as a pre-text to his work, Valdés celebrates his cultural legacies alongside a rereading of their meaning vis-à-vis the present day.

Valdés states, ‘Every time I start a new piece, I draw upon the wealth of knowledge that art history has imparted to me, empowering my creative process. Cultural imagery shapes my worldview profoundly’.(2)

From 1983 Valdés progressed to working in three dimensions. He adapted elements from his paintings – simplified, art historically charged compositions and richly textured surfaces, almost an assemblage – into sculptures made from wood and bronze castings. The artist favoured wood and its pregiven qualities, its natural irregularity provided variegated pattern and colour. Materials like marble, ceramic, silver, and glass have also been used. Progressively working in larger scales, Valdés began to display his sculptures in open spaces, gardens, city squares and promenades via public art commissions. What is unique to monumental sculpture, especially the public variety, is they invite the beholder to touch and engage with the work in different ways. Lying dormant in his painterly practice was a tactile quality teased in his textured surfaces, now realised and admired at a deeper level in sculpture.

Reina Mariana (Queen Mariana) 2004 is the culmination of Valdés’ multidisciplinary practice, bringing together all his major ideas and techniques mastered over his career. The rotund figure is appropriated from Velázquez’s official Portrait of Mariana of Austria 1652-53, a full-length painting of the Queen of Spain at age 18, who reigned from 1649 until the death of her husband and uncle Philip IV in 1665.(3) With her son Charles II constantly suffering from ill-health and leaving no heir, she rose to a position of prominence in Spain's political sphere as Queen Consort. The War of the Spanish Succession ultimately began because the throne had no heir apparent, putting an end to almost 200 years of Hapsburg dominance. Her monumentality in Reina Mariana belies the fact her regency was constantly under geopolitical and familial crisis. The work is both a homage to the great Velázquez and a historical mirror Valdés holds up to modern Spain and the political turmoil it suffered under the Francoist dictatorship.

The sculpture’s dimensions approximate Mariana’s more than life-size scale in Velázquez’s painting, as if Valdés has plucked her directly out of pictorial space. The regalia laden dress and decorated wig exaggerate her proportions, holding her up rigid. In contrast, Valdés’ triumphant silhouette is stripped back to a monochrome and dark green patina. The surface is pocked and distressed, welding marks and imprints intentionally exposed, the simplified figure is wiped clean of its entitlements. Similarly, her visage is nondescript, contrary to a portrait’s fundamental intention. Maybe controversial for a court portraitist, Velázquez depicted her with a mildly unhappy and nervous expression, for Valdés her anonymous face and bold pose seem stoically attentive. Despite her toughened exterior and domineering presence, the youthful femininity of the original portrait is preserved by Valdés. He examines the notion that power is, on a symbolic level, arbitrary, allowing the artist to creatively redefine this historic iconography.

The Reina Mariana series has taken on an emblematic status in Valdés’ oeuvre. Echoing Andy Warhol (1928-1987), her figure is continuously repeated in series of drawings, prints, and sculpture. Each time the outline, colour, or surface is adjusted in a unique way as to never reach a finalised form. For their immediate likeness, on closer inspection they are in fact all unique. They are hinged on the expressive capacity of Valdés’ aesthetic in which he can never visually exhaust his subject matter and therefore remain dedicated to their reimagining.   

Footnotes:

1. Manolo Valdés, quoted in McNay, A,. Manolo Valdés: ‘“I only like apples if they look like Cezanne’s apples!”,’ Studio International, 21 June 2016, accessed October 2024: https://www.studiointernational.com/manolo-valdes-interview-i-only-like-apples-if-they-look-like-cezannes#:~:text=Manolo%20Vald%C3%A9s%3A%20'I%20only%20like,'
2. Valdés, M., quoted in ‘“Valdés” by Manolo Valdés at Anima Gallery and Interview with the Artist,’ Selections Magazine, 2024, accessed October 2024: https://selectionsarts.com/valdes-by-manolo-valdes-at-anima-gallery-and-interview-with-the-artist/
3. The Spanish branch of the Hapsburg family practised intermarriage to preserve their bloodline and succession to the throne

Tim Marvin

Tim Marvin is an emerging curator and art historian based in Sydney. He has a Bachelor of Art Theory (Honours, First Class) from the University of New South Wales, and currently holds the position of gallery registrar at Sullivan + Strümpf, Sydney.

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