Avenue George V - Paris







Fascinated by the properties of different materials, the artist gives them life in a unparalleled way. Aluminium, bronze, resin and stainless steel are shaped to perfection to redefine the portraiture of women. The exhibition, titled Manolo Valdés, Monumentales Égeries is a true ode to femininity. These stylised heads, adorned with crowns and headdresses are women, Muses. All seem caught in a moment of absolute serenity. Valdés' sculptures offer a very human, very humane and new apprehension of monumental sculpture. Here there is not a relationship of power, with the artwork towering over the viewer, but rather a conversation, an endless interaction between the sculpture, the viewer, and the environement.

Valdés interprets the History of Art, and pays tribute to the great Classical masters such as Velázquez, El Greco, Picasso, Matisse, Brancusi… His Contemporary pieces are a bridge between History and our present. To celebrate this exhibition on the Avenue George V, the artist specially designed a sculpture of Clio, the Antic Muse of History, created after Sandro Botticelli’s own Clio.


“Art of each era always gathers elements from the past; Art is a succession and an eternal addition”. Manolo Valdés




One of the most internationally established Contemporary Spanish painter, sculptor and draughtsman, Manolo Valdés (born in Valencia, 1942) began his career in the 1960s as one of the founding members of Equipo Crónica, a group of artists who took inspiration from Pop Art to challenge the Spanish dictatorship of Franco and the History of Art itself. When the movement ended in 1981, he continued his own artistic exploration centered on the appropriation and reinterpretation of masterpieces. He has developed an individual style that reviews History without detracting from the original subject. Quoting figures from well-known works of art, Valdés revitalises these familiar images by taking them out of their original context. The timelessness of the image as the axis of the visual experience is the determining factor in his creations.
Valdés has had numerous solo and group shows internationally in galleries and museums alike and his work is part of prestigious private and public collections, notably the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France; the de Young Museum of San Francisco; the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, Italy; the Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg, Germany; the Menil Foundation, Houston, Texas; the Modern Museet Art, Stockholm, Sweden; the Museo Nacional Centre de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts among others. He currently lives and work between Madrid, Spain and New York city, USA.