Bull Lying Down (Toro Acostado)

In this piece belonging to the series Bulls (Toros), Pablo Serrano seeks to simplify shapes, approaching abstraction in his attempt to capture the essence of the animal. The designs for this series were completed in Montevideo, although the majority of them were sculpted after his arrival in Spain in 1955, like this bull. This work alludes to a lying bull, reduced to a prismatic shape with well-defined edges to create a play between light and shadow which define the position of the animal. It involves a radical change of direction for Pablo Serrano, from more traditional figuration to the schematization and geometrization of shapes which approaches abstraction, recalling the formal simplification of the figure of a bull created by Pablo Picasso in a series of 11 lithographs from 1945.