Bailarina (Dancer)

Alberto Sánchez assimilated an avant-garde language with no direct influence from Paris, his sole visit to the French capital coming in 1937 to submit work for the Spanish Pavilion at the International Exhibition. A self-taught artist, Sánchez followed an intuition that would lead him to transfer his experience of landscape over to his figures, materials and patina. Of the artists who worked in Spain in this period, he was most accomplished in adapting Surrealist thought to a personal poetic tied to Spain’s inner-history and the traditional link to popular culture inspired by the ideological and theoretical framework of the Generation of ’98.

Bailarina (Dancer) conveys a Spanish dance step by virtue of a high relief with just two visual planes. The dynamic development of the surface, based on concave and curve forms, and a succession of linear folds to define the clothing, serve to conceive of a hybrid, earth- and patina-coloured figure, in which anatomic or physiognomic details have been dismissed to suggest the dynamism of landscape forms, for instance gentle slopes or tilled fields. In all likelihood, Sánchez presented the work at the Españoles residentes en París (Spanish Residents in Paris) exhibition, held in Madrid’s Botanical Garden in 1929 and also featuring artists such as Pablo Picasso, Juan Gris, Joan Miró and Salvador Dalí, among others.



Carmen Fernández Aparicio