Cabeza de muchacha (Head of a Young Woman)

Danish-born artist Eva Preetsmann Aggerholm, whose education took place between Copenhagen and Paris, developed her career primarily in Spain, attracting the attention of the critics by way of a joint exhibition held with her husband, the painter Daniel Vázquez Díaz, in the Palacio de Bibliotecas y Museos in Madrid in March 1921. Juan Ramón Jiménez wrote an introduction and in his mention of her work gave it less importance than her husband’s. Only the writer and art critic Margarita Nelken lamented how “if Eva Aggerholm had held an exhibition of her work alone, she would have appeared to us as one of the most important sculptors [sic] to come to our attention in recent years”. Her work was characterised by its formal austerity and the synthesis of emotion and the absence of expression in her figures, standing apart from the widespread classical-Mediterranean trend of her contemporary sculptors.

This female head adroitly represents the sculptural concept of the artist, in which the mass matches the force of the volume, the influence of Antoine Bourdelle, with the cursory and elegant drawing of the facial features reflecting a melancholy and meditative bearing.



Carmen Fernández Aparicio