Great prophet

In 1904 Gargallo made three drawings (one of them analytical) of a figure of a Prophet, which would have a certain sculptural translation in the imposing relief of Saint John the Baptist made between 1906 and 1911 for the frieze of the saints on the main façade of the Pavilion. of Administration of the Hospital de la Santa Cruz y San Pablo, Barcelona. In 1926 he executed, in copper sheet, a premonitory and overwhelming Head of a Prophet, a probable study, very finished and significant, for the definitive Great Prophet, 1933, with which he culminated a process of creative obsession that lasted almost thirty years.

In this extraordinarily archetypal work, Gargallo brings together and synthesizes, in an emblematic way, almost all of his expressive and conceptual achievements in the field of the representation of volumes, space and light, achieved throughout an artistic and vital career absolutely dedicated to in the investigation of new resources and the search for a personal and innovative language, to the point of having resolved the most notable formal aspects through the use of sign markers derived from the work of the thick iron plates that he used during the last years of his life, so that, being a work modeled for casting and always cast in bronze, it still causes, in certain inattentive observers, the confusion of considering it executed in wrought iron.