Man and Woman

Subirachs depicted this subject on various occasions. In 1968 he produced a Seated Figure (Fine Arts Museum, Bilbao) in which the upper part of the woman’s body is the protruding element, as the male figure is in the present work, entitled Man and Woman. In 1971 the artist created a Seated Woman in which the position is reversed, as in the present work. Other thematically similar sculptures include Female Figure (1970), in which the body is segmented in a way comparable to those in another series by the artist, and Seated Woman (1971) in which, as in the previous example, the head is separated from the torso. Man and Woman is undoubtedly the most ambitious of Subirachs’s works of this type and is characteristic of this period of his career.