To celebrate the second edition of George V Monumental, an open air exhibition on the prestigious Parisian avenue organised by the Comité George V in partnership with Opera Gallery Paris, Manolo Valdés offers us a sculpture trail featuring ten monumental works, designed as an ode to matter and to the female portrait genre.
The delicate but gigantic icons, with their various colours and textures dialogue perfectly with the elegant sandstone, Haussmann-style buildings of the Avenue. Whether it be his emblematic Meninas, a tribute to Velázquez, here in four different translucid colours reminiscent of precious stones or his giant feminine heads bearing majestic crowns of butterflies or foliage, these monumental muses enhance the enchantment of their surroundings.
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.

mpefm FRANCE art press release