El Beso (The Kiss)

Enrique Grau first began to work in sculpture in the 1980s after working as a costume and set designer for several theater and dance companies in Bogotá. Indeed, his sculptures are loaded with gestures and dynamism that seem to reproduce a theatrical space. The Kiss recreates an intimate scene in which Grau’s prototypical woman Rita, who began to appear in his paintings in the 1950s, requests a kiss from her lover. The first full-body bronze sculpture of Rita appeared in 1990; reclined on a chair, she posed as a seductive middle-class woman, both sophisticated and ordinary. In the present sculpture, the two interacting heads, devoid of bodies, evoke an aesthetic of the grotesque also seen in the work of such Colombian contemporaries as Fernando Botero. Here, the brown tone and solidity of the bronze grants the whimsical interaction of the child-like heads an austere quality, evoking and mocking classical busts of the aristocracy. Throughout his multifaceted practice, Grau deftly combined baroque and contemporary aesthetics, blurring the boundaries between tradition and modernity.

Text credit: Produced in collaboration with the University of Maryland Department of Art History & Archaeology and Patricia Ortega-Miranda