-Julio Gonzalez (1876-1942)

Kent Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of sculpture and drawings by Julio Gonzalez. The exhibit will encompass over 40 years of Gonzalez's career, beginning from 1900 at which time the Gonzalez family sold its studio in Barcelona and moved to Paris until his eventual death in Arcueil in 1942. During this time, Gonzalez combined his training in industrial welding with a revolutionary understanding of spatial representation to create an innovative relationship between drawing and sculpture. His early years in Paris were spent within the avant-garde circle of pre-war Europe, joining other bohemian artists such as Pablo Picasso, André Salmon, Juan Gris, Max Jacob and Guillaume Appolinaire.

This early phase of Gonzalez's career was cut short due to a shortage of oxygen and acetylene caused by World War I, which forced him to give up working in welded iron and concentrate instead on drawing. At this time, Gonzalez created many studies that he hoped to later realize in welded iron. He was determined to return to the discipline of metal sculpture and to use industrial materials for the creation of beauty, rather than the destruction of civilization.

Although Gonzalez spent much of his career as a draughtsman, his concepts were always modeled for drawing in space. Both Gonzalez's father and grandfather were welders by trade, and also known as great metal and fire artisans. Gonzalez approached the craft from a more representational perspective, concentrating on its artistic possibilities rather than its industrial function. Along with Constantin Brancusi and Alberto Giacometti, Gonzalez is regarded as one of the early pioneers of modern sculpture, as well as a founder of the tradition of welded-iron sculpture that began in the 1930’s and extends into our present age.

Drawing served as the groundwork of Gonzalez's sculpture, creating a view of sculpture as three-dimensional drawing. Although World War I prevented him from being a more prolific sculptor at that time, Gonzalez produced an abundance of welded-iron sculpture in the last ten years of his life. This outpouring can be seen as a result of his productive relationship with Picasso. Experiments and collaborations with Picasso between 1928 and 1932 contributed to the transition of Cubist theory and two-dimensional pictoralism into the three-dimensional space of sculpture. Picasso sought his old friend’s expertise in translating drawings to three-dimensional figures, as well as his mastery of the art of acetylene welding. Gonzalez's influence also reached the next generation. Sculptors such as David Smith and Anthony Caro point to Gonzalez as a key figure in the formation of their art.

Gonzalez has been the subject of over 50 museum retrospectives including two important survey exhibitions within the United States organized by the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1956) and more recently the Guggenheim Museum (1983). Comprehensive collections of works by Gonzalez can be found at the Tate Gallery, London, the Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris as well as IVAM/Centre Julio Gonzalez in Valencia, Spain. In addition to these focus collections, works by Gonzalez are included in over 30 public collections worldwide.