Miguel Berrocal : 1955/65 iron and bronze sculptures

Miguel Ortiz Berrocal, born in 1933 in Villanueva de Algaidas in the province of Malaga, Spain, revealed his love for art at a very young age. He completed his education at both academic institutions as well as the prestigious Facultad de Ciencias Exatas in Madrid. In 1960, after having been in contact with cultural circles first in Rome and then in Paris, he decided to devote himself entirely to sculpting. 

Mr. Berrocal started working with iron in a way that made him internationally known. His first sculptures, in forged and soldered iron, produced in the mid fifties, are shown in this exhibition. These sculptures can be presented in various positions and have various interpretations on the part of the spectator, who may then select the one he finds most congenial. Contemporary sculpture therefore, a game (on both parts one could say) based on the fantasy of the artist, is thus conceived and completed as a unit that can be reinterpreted in many different versions, which the user can study and set in a form which cannot ever be conceived as a definitive solution. 

A further radicalization of this idea was to be the distinguishing feature of the works that followed in the immediate future from which were born the famous modular sculptures which could be disassembled: the artist wanted to create a sculpture using his understanding of the meaning of the body, its proportions and dimensions (a sculptured body to represent analogously a human body: famous are the reinterpretations of the male and female classical torsos, from those of mythological times to our days). From the monumental sculptures to the precious realizations of jewels from the 1970s through the 80s and 90s, and from micro-sculpture to the achievement of a series of multiples accesible to all. Berrocal's world tells the story of infinite manipulations of objects and parts in order to create a supreme image of sculpture, seen and conceived in its totality, and then seen as it dissolves because of an analysis which disassembles its elements, in a process of research of its meaning and of its structural composition.