Reina Mariana

Spanish artist Manolo Valdés began his artistic career at age of 15, using Spain’s rich history of art, influenced by European and African forms, to shape his early works. During the 1960s, he co-founded Equipo Crónica, an artistic team that used Pop Art to question the dictatorship of Francisco Franco, who suppressed his country’s social and cultural life between 1939 and 1975. After the group dissolved in 1981, as Spain awoke from its enforced slumber, Valdés reinvented his work creating the figurative, expressive style centered on art historical motifs in drawing, painting, printmaking and sculpture.

Reina Mariana (Queen Mariana) is part of Valdés’s most famous series of sculptures, based on Spanish artist Diego Velázquez’s Queen Mariana (1652-1653), a portrait of the second wife of Felipe IV. Velázquez was the chronicler of court life for the King and his family, capturing them at a time when Spain’s imperial power stretched across the globe. Mariana, from the Austrian Hapsburg family, was well known to be an unhappy participant in her adopted country’s life. The voluminous and starched costume of the regal Spanish aristocracy holds her upright and rigid, like a bird caught in a cage. Valdés pays homage to one of his country’s most iconic painters and subjects, while commenting upon the life of those who serve subservient roles in history.