Queen Mariana

Valdés has continually turned to the paintings of Diego Velázquez as a source and site of investigation. In particular, since the early 1980s he has repeatedly reworked Velázquez's portrait of Queen Mariana (ca. 1652), producing both pictorial and sculptural versions in different materials and scales—a reworking that might be compared to Pablo Picasso's 1957 series of paintings paraphrasing Velázquez's Las Meninas. The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao's Queen Mariana of 2001 is larger than Valdés's comparable works of the 1980s, enabling him to develop the sculpture's surface texture. The change in morphology and meaning that occurs throughout Valdés's re-presentations of Velázquez's image can be seen in this work: The figure's overall form is preserved but it has become faceless, at odds with the very concept of a portrait. Translated into three dimensions, rendered in bronze, and presented in isolation, the icon is a detail become whole, containing references to its original context and yet possessing a life of its own.