Self-Portrait With Bottles

This work belongs to the first artistic era of Antón González (1945–1947) involving expressionist figuration, with lively and warm colors, which has a German origin according to scholar Federico Torralba. It remains a work of formation and experimentation in which the artist makes use of color and its expressive potential with pictorial methods which stem from the fauvist and expressionist avant-gardes. He parts from the mimetic reproduction of reality to dive further into the esthetic and emotional values which can be acquired through painting on canvas. In 1947, he started a series of self-portraits, this example being the first. Antón painted his self-portrait in a symmetrical composition, playing with a pictorial technique involving large amounts of pigment distributed with large, highly charged brushstrokes, with barely any drawing that defines the figures. The shape is still outlined by different colors which contrast with each other, thereby acquiring their form and identity in the space.