Still Life

Santamaría participated in the Third Biennale Hispano-American Art Exhibition (III Bienal Hispanoamericana de Arte) in Barcelona in 1955 with this still life. It belongs to one of the new thematic series of her artistic career undertaken from 1954 to 1956: Empty Bottles (Botellas Vacías). Here there is already a perceivable interest in new pictorial methods far from imitation, which tend to highlight light values and grant a certain degree of autonomy to chromatic masses, and above all an autonomous assessment of lines which start to take on special prominence, outlining the plasticity of the ensembles with sharp contours. The esthetic interests of Santamaría drifted toward simplification and formal decomposition within neo-cubist geometrization. It is not a breakdown or a sudden replacement of figurative elements with abstract values but a slow and meditative process of maturation which eventually led him to use non-imitative languages, to abstraction, from 1956 following an enriching journey across Europe.