José Luis Medina Castro (1909-2003) - Spanish Woman (1955)

- Bronze. Signed and dated. Unique work. - Dimensions: 10.5 x 8 x 34.5 cm, including base. - Born into the cultured Castilian bourgeoisie and imbued with a literary sensibility, José Luis Medina Castro (1909-2003) established himself as one of the most singular voices in 20th-century Spanish sculpture. His artistic language blends the robustness of Egyptian art with the harmony of Hellenic classicism in solid and assertive forms. Trained at the San Fernando School of Fine Arts alongside figures such as Baltasar Lobo, his career was marked by profound ethical integrity and rigorous self-criticism which, while limiting his output, conferred upon his work—centered on an iconography of divinized women and, fundamentally, on a bestiary of profound spiritual equality with humankind—an absolute technical and conceptual revaluation. A modelling teacher and winner of the National Sculpture Prize in 1963 for his Goose relief, Medina transcended his teaching work to become the great master of European animal sculpture, managing, through bronze, marble and masterful drawing, to capture the vital mystery that animates inert matter, always starting from the principle that the animal, as in ancient Greece, possesses an inalienable spiritual essence.