Andrew Huber
Head of Department
Lot 33
MARIANO RODRIGUEZ(1912-1990)Pelea de Gallos
1960
1960
16 November 2022, 17:00 EST
New YorkSold for US$22,950 inc. premium
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Randy Reynolds
Specialist, Head of Sale
MARIANO RODRIGUEZ (1912-1990)
Pelea de Gallos
1960
signed and dated 60
oil on canvas
38 1/2 by 43 1/2 in.
97.8 by 110.5 cm.
This work is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity signed by Dolores and Alejandro Rodriguez, Havana, Cuba and will be included in volume III of the Catalogue Raisonné of Mariano Rodriguez.
1960
signed and dated 60
oil on canvas
38 1/2 by 43 1/2 in.
97.8 by 110.5 cm.
This work is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity signed by Dolores and Alejandro Rodriguez, Havana, Cuba and will be included in volume III of the Catalogue Raisonné of Mariano Rodriguez.
Footnotes
Provenance
The Estate of the Artist
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner
Literature
José Veigas and Dannys Montes de Oca, Mariano: (1912-1990): tema, discurso y humanidad, 2004, p. 98, illustrated in color
In the first five years of the 1960s, Mariano's abstraction gradually gave way in his work, to intense searches in the field of New Figuration as well as to the reinterpretation of the classics of universal art. Despite this, the Cuban master resolved during this period, and within a non-objective condition, paintings that have become of essential mention and to which he entrusted the most urgent issues that impacted his life and those around him. During the period from 1960 to 1965, Mariano used composition and color with extreme wisdom, but above all in each new aesthetic territory that he explored, he handled them with a versatility that produced different and very radical results.
In these latest abstractions, the visual result is no longer intended to be the formal laboratory of the previous decade, but to convey certain states of mind. He placed great energy into pieces that he generally conceptualized as landscapes. Beyond the widespread political landscape, a crucial work from this period, the monumental Oxford (Spy Ship) of 1963, resolved in calm tones, essentially blue and white, and in which the silence and anguish of waiting can almost be felt. Contrasting with Oxford, the present work, Pelea de Gallos (1960), like Puente from 1962, gives rise to chromatic solutions and the strength of the strokes with which he defines the environment are of a visual violence not usual for the artist. The contemporaneous political reverberations have seemingly emerged through the artist formal artistic explorations. Pelea de Gallos, in particular, is defined by two zones: a kind of flaming dome from which columns of smoke seem to escape covering a turbulent space of swirling bluish greens surrounding deep black, which seems to rotate impelled by whirlpool force. Each fragment of the artwork is concatenated with the whole, adding tension and entropy. Perhaps Pelea de Gallos is another cry of Cuban expressionism that our reticence towards the abstract overlooked.
(Translated and edited from the Spanish).
We are grateful to Beatriz Gago and the Estate of Mariano Rodriguez for the assistance with the cataloguing of this work.
