This interesting bronze speaks of everyday things through solid, forthright forms that convey a sense of mystery.

Antonio López has engaged with sculpture throughout his whole career, ever since he enrolled at the San Fernando School of Fine Arts of Madrid in 1950, borrowing from the Quattrocento its strong definition of volume. And although his paintings are much more plentiful than his sculptures, volume and matter are, apart from colour, equally critical in the modelling of his pictures.

As from 1957, and up to 1960, his work underwent what we could call a surrealist shift towards what is known as

 Magic Realism 

this entailed the introduction of everyday real images into a space that does not belong to them, and in so doing creating a strange and unexpected effect.

. Later, his loyalty to and dependence on reality took over his work.

In Mujer durmiendo, the bed, one of life’s essential spaces, a link with the unreality of dreams and a threshold of death, takes up virtually the whole space. The sleeping woman of the title dozes with her breast uncovered, though the rigidness of her posture has a disturbing quality. The bed is a central element around which the rest of the objects in the room revolve, creating a compact and silent environment which, when coupled with the coldness of the medium, makes us think of the closeness of death.

Between 1960 and 1964, López made several pieces with the same motif in different media. The bronze is cast in two pieces assembled at a later stage. Though an edition of nine copies was initially planned, only two were eventually executed: the piece in the BBVA Collection (1/9, 1960) and one in a private collection in Caracas (2/9, 1964). There are another two versions of this work, one in plaster (1960-61) in the artist’s private collection, and another in polychrome wood at Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (1963-64).