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Lot Essay
Tte au miroir is one of Gonzlez's most extreme and memorable figurative abstractions. Executed in 1934, this striking sculpture portrays the head of a woman looking in a mirror with a stunning economy of means.
Having developed the 'drawing in space' technique in the later masks of the early 1930s, and the beautiful small silver heads of 1933, in the present work Gonzlez further refined this reductive approach to the point where he is able to capture his subject with only four simple and distinct constructional elements. In this outrageously simple work, Gonzlez conveys both the face of the woman and the mirror with its own reflective face in one single flat moulded disc that projects from an arc which also doubles as the outline of the back of the woman's head and the curve of the arm that holds the mirror. At the top of this dramatic yet simple arc, wild spikes of parted hair almost naturalistically rendered lend the sculpture an organic sense of life which bestows on the work a distinct personality as well as an airy sense of completeness. Blurring the lines between figuration and abstraction, Gonzlez sculpts in a unique middle ground between the two that infuses the space around and within his work with an aura of meaning and a powerful sense of presence.
The strong physical presence of Tte au miroir which Gonzlez's unique articulation of space generates was later extended in the following year in a more textural Head where the arc was elongated and refined to the point where it became the dominant feature of the sculpture. In addition the theme of this work was later developed in Femme se coiffant III as well as his largest and most ammitious work Femme au miroir of 1936-37.
Having developed the 'drawing in space' technique in the later masks of the early 1930s, and the beautiful small silver heads of 1933, in the present work Gonzlez further refined this reductive approach to the point where he is able to capture his subject with only four simple and distinct constructional elements. In this outrageously simple work, Gonzlez conveys both the face of the woman and the mirror with its own reflective face in one single flat moulded disc that projects from an arc which also doubles as the outline of the back of the woman's head and the curve of the arm that holds the mirror. At the top of this dramatic yet simple arc, wild spikes of parted hair almost naturalistically rendered lend the sculpture an organic sense of life which bestows on the work a distinct personality as well as an airy sense of completeness. Blurring the lines between figuration and abstraction, Gonzlez sculpts in a unique middle ground between the two that infuses the space around and within his work with an aura of meaning and a powerful sense of presence.
The strong physical presence of Tte au miroir which Gonzlez's unique articulation of space generates was later extended in the following year in a more textural Head where the arc was elongated and refined to the point where it became the dominant feature of the sculpture. In addition the theme of this work was later developed in Femme se coiffant III as well as his largest and most ammitious work Femme au miroir of 1936-37.