Danseuse à la palette

Julio Gonzáles’s sculpture is a figure composed of welded steel rods, plates, and brackets, which despite the heaviness of the material employed appears extremely agile and seems almost to be floating. However, the work’s abstract character provides only a rough semblance of a female dancer. The right leg is thrown back and the torso, which resembles a painter’s palette, is stretched backward. A few strands of hair fall vertically from the dancer’s head, while the curved arms are thrown into the air.

Despite the spartan linear construction, the sculpture’s open form succeeds in structuring space, playfully capturing the dance’s sequence of movements. Gonzáles, a trained wrought-iron craftsman, took up sculpture at a relatively late age, learning how to weld in a car factory. Together with Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) he produced a number of metal sculptures between 1928 and 1931 which influenced Gonzáles’s pictorial language, oscillating between Cubism and Surrealism. With his use of welded steel—a common material employed in both craft and industry—Gonzáles made a groundbreaking contribution to art history which would have a sustained influence on future generations of artists.