{"status":true,"msg":{"data":{"id":47377,"auction_id":95,"set_id":125,"lot_number":"130","artist":"Fernando Zóbel (1924 - 1984)","title":"El Rió V","starting_price":8000000,"signed_dated":"signed (lower left and verso), dated 1978, and inscribed \"El Rió, 78-28\" (verso)","medium":"oil on canvas","size":"40\" x 40\" (102 cm x 102 cm)","property":null,"coa":null,"provenance":"Galería Theo, Madrid","exhibited":null,"literature":"De la Torre, Alfonso and Rafael Pérez-Madero. Fernando Zóbel: Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings (1946 - 1984). Madrid: Fundación Azcona, 2022. Listed as nº \"78-28” with painting description on page 574.","write_up":"Fernando Zóbel’s Beloved River Júcar In Honor of His 100th Birth Anniversary<br /><br /> As we fervidly anticipate the 100th birth anniversary of Fernando Zóbel this August 27, 2024, a captivating work from his highly acclaimed, widely celebrated, and lyrically spiritual Serie Blanca takes centerstage.<br /><br />The 1970s are considered the pinnacle of Zóbel's artistry and career. During that prolific decade, he produced his most contemplative, spiritually charged series, with El Júcar and La Vista initially setting the introspective tone of Zóbel's 1970s.<br /><br />In 1975, Zóbel began to produce a body of work that would eventually become the zenith of his artistic career: the Serie Blanca. His biographer, Angeles Villalba Salvador, writes in her chronology of the eminent artist: \"After twelve years spent studying color, in the final pictures of La Vista, Zóbel's painting becomes predominantly white. He thus commences the series, Serie Blanca, which he will continue until 1978.\"<br /><br />Villalba Salvador would describe the Serie Blanca as \"characterized by infinitely degraded whites, which distribute spaces and volumes and seem to lose themselves on the edges of the canvas. Whites approaching blues, greys and greyish browns fuse with the virgin whiteness of the canvas or paper in such a way that the whole thing becomes the background. With Serie Blanca, the thematic aspect is broadened: light, volume, form, gesture, anatomies, still lifes, and, of course, themes from the history of art.\"<br /><br />Zóbel would debut his Serie Blanca works in a November 1978 exhibition titled \"La Serie Blanca: Pintura 1975 – 1978\" at Madrid's Galería Theo. A mere seven months before this exhibition, on April 23, 1978, Zobel would paint the work at hand, titled El Río V, in Cuenca, Spain.<br /><br />El Río V comes from an offshoot series of the Serie Blanca titled \"El Río.\" Spanish art and literary critic Juan Manuel Bonet writes in his essay \"Fernando Zóbel,<br /><br />Revisited\" that \"El Río\" is \"a subsequent series… which Zóbel had actually begun in 1976, unfold[ing] on the verge of total whiteness.\"<br /><br />The El Rio series is again inspired by the Júcar, the enthralling river flowing right through the heart of Zóbel's beloved hometown of Cuenca. It can be remembered that Zóbel settled in Cuenca in July 1963, where he would envision the Museo de Arte Abstracto Español (formed from his extensive collection of Spanish abstract paintings, which he started collecting in 1958) and in the following years, the artist would find himself reveling in wonder and awe with the city. Zóbel would prodigiously paint landscapes centering on Cuenca. This city would also fill his notebooks, pictures, and writings, as Villalba Salvador puts it.<br /><br />One of the windows of Zóbel's Cuenca apartment-cumstudio overlooks the mouth of the Júcar, whose sinuous flows had so enthralled the artist that he dedicated Fernando Zóbel painting in his Madrid Studio, 1978 Photography by Luis Pérez Mínguez three entire series (including the Las Orillas of the 1980s) immortalizing its meandering magnificence.<br /><br />Furthermore, Zóbel's favorite restaurant in Cuenca, the Recreo Peral, also fronts the Júcar. Bonet reminisces in writing: \"There, on more than one occasion, I observed the joy that filled Zóbel and radiated from him. He strove to understand himself as a painter of waterscapes and relied on the mechanisms of memory to figure out what would lead him to devote an entire series of paintings to the Júcar in its flow through Cuenca.\"<br /><br />We see in the work at hand, El Río V, Zóbel's perennial homage to Cuenca and the enthralling River Júcar that flows right through the city's heart. Bathed in swathes of whites, the canvas is penetrated by varying gradations ranging from blacks, greys, and washed-out browns that are situated within an orderly yet dynamic linear configuration. This likely evokes the banks of the Júcar and the ebb and flow that eternally caresses them, as if leaving every memory of those who marvel at the river's sight.<br />Devoid of the vividness of color, Zóbel exalts memory as an integral part of his artistic praxis, one that uses the contemplative mind and the introspective soul in remembering and rendering images of lyrical magnificence that left the artist in sublime ecstasy. With the seemingly endless whites and a delicate interplay between color and value that gives much prominence to the power of contemplation, we come face to face with an image of dazzling luminosity. The pictorial composition metamorphoses into a reflective space.<br /><br />El Río V sees Zóbel wallowing in an unfaltering spirituality that the Júcar had seemingly become his own religion and perpetual succor. This would highly manifest itself toward the end of his earthly life when he saturated his canvases with more ethereally poetic images of the Júcar and Cuenca, his beloved muses.<br /><br />As per his last will, Zóbel was laid to rest in 1984 at the San Isidro Cemetery in Cuenca's highest part, overlooking the Júcar. Even in the afterlife, Zóbel remained as one with the Júcar, delighting in sustained thought on the river that gave him and his art so much life and spirituality.<br /><br />As long as the Júcar and its dazzling flow remain, Zóbel's memory remains in perpetuity.<br /><br /> Much like the enigmatic river that so penetrated him and was forever adored in the hallowed tabernacle of his psyche, we honor his memory on his birth centennial for his contributions to the flowering and flourishing of Philippine abstract art. (Adrian Maranan)","lot_group":"Painting","lot_details_html":null,"alias":null,"hp":13000000,"bp":0.2016,"isWithdrawn":0,"accounting_hp":13000000,"userBid":5930,"isPaid":0,"userId":22,"lot_status":"SOLD","isDone":1,"bid_history_id":null,"reserve_price":null,"hammer_price":15620800,"fav":0},"image":[{"id":47067,"img_url":"https://leongallery.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/v2/auction/95/125/lot/130.jpg","isFeatured":1}]},"increment":[11000000,12000000,13000000,14000000,15000000,16000000,17000000,18000000,19000000,20000000],"prev":129,"next":131,"count_bid":0,"bid_history":[],"tokenExpired":1}