Relief

In the 1950s José Luis Sánchez travelled to Italy to design the Spanish Pavilion for the Milan Triennial. There he made contact with Gio Ponti and with the group of artists associated with the magazine Domus, through whom he was introduced to the ideas of the Bauhaus, leading to a new interest in his part in the applied arts. On his return to Spain the artist began to produce works for architectural projects as a result of his friendship with the architect José Luis Fernández del Amo and of the commissions that he received from the Instituto Nacional de Colonización. Projects of this type opened up a new and important direction in Sánchez’s career: he conceived such works as complementing the architecture in question and as a way of ordering specific spaces rather than as a manner of simply filling voids. This is the case with the present sculpture, which was designed for the offices of a bank. It reveals the presence of elements characteristic of his sculptural style: the paring-down of the lines, the balance between the different elements within the whole and the presence of forms of organic origin that refer to a subtle and sensitive understanding of nature.