Mujer sentada de espaldas (Rear View of Seated Woman)

The wooden bas-relief Mujer sentada de espaldas (Rear View of Seated Woman) is an example of how rich the Spanish sculpture panorama was between the wars. Made for a bourgeois Parisian interior decoration project, the work is clearly indebted to Paul Gauguin sculpture from his Tahitian period, which Daniel González was familiar with through his work with the Basque sculptor Francisco Durrio in Paris. The work is an example of the volume coming from the line of the figure, a technique based in González’s draughtsmanship, stemming from a desire for autonomy and from artistic inquiry. González, who exhibited at the Société des artistes indépendants in 1928, and individually at the Atelier Perrier in 1931, represents a kind of realism that assimilates the structural values of the Cubist form. The theme of the female figure with her back turned was very common in his earlier charcoal drawings, when he was taking from classical repertoires of sculptural motifs such as the bather, the natural heir to the classical motif of Venus rising out of the waters which appears intermittently throughout the sculpture of modern classicism. Basically, the work brings together a series of avant-garde elements applied to a return to figuration.

Carmen Fernández Aparicio