PROPERTY FROM THE COLLECTION OF A DISTINGUISHED COUPLE

Exhibited: The Luz Gallery, Zobel: Paintings, Drawings, Prints, Manila, 6 - 19 February 1964

ABOUT THE WORK

The 1960s would be an important period for Fernando Zo?bel : The first year of the new decade would feature his participation in the Guggenheim show Before Picasso and After Miro?. It would be as rich and eventful as the current years 2022 through 2024 that would find Fernando Zo?bel in a solo show at the Museo Nacional del Prado that will journey to Manila and Singapore when it closes in March 2023. It is a signal honor for a modern artist to be in at Spain’s national repository of Medieval and Renaissance art and an expression of its desire to connect to a new generation of art enthusiasts by creating a unique dialogue. In 1961, Zo?bel held a landmark first show at the newly opened Luz Gallery and then moved to Madrid for good, marking both occasions with exhibitions of the Serie Negra, black calligraphy on white that would define his work from 1959 to 1962. In that year, he would participate in a collective show at the Tate as well as the Venice Biennale. Angeles Villalba Salvador, his biographer, would record the following regarding the years beginning in 1963, the year this work was created. The years elapsing between 1963 and 1975 constitute the longest stage in Zo?bel’s painting. This year, he returns to color and slowly, the siennas, dark browns, ochres and greys start to appear, as in works like Atienza, Armadura III and Pancorbo. The theme of memory, hinted at in previous series, begins to take shape in this new stage, in which Zo?bel, by means of forms, objects and imagination, seeks “to remember in pictorial terms”, as he himself put it. In the prelude to this colorist stage, Zo?bel develops the idea of painting based on the memory of the experience lived, a concept whose literary equivalent is to be found in Marcel Proust’s great work, A? la recherche du temps perdu. In 1963, the idea of creating a museum outside Madrid would begin to take shape following a historic trip to Cuenca. He would exhibit once more at the Luz Gallery in 1964 and archival photographs capture the opening night, which included works such as the one at hand. Once again Zo?bel demonstrates the effortless balance and delicate composition that belies the careful and deliberate construction that is the foundation of all his works; and that was underlined at the recent Prado exhibition, Zo?bel : The Future of the Past.