JOSEP MARIA SUBIRACHS SITJAR (Barcelona, 1927-2014). "Venus", 1967. Marble sculpture. Unique piece. Signed on the base. Size: 45 x 49 x 14 cm. It is in the Venus and torsos of the sixties that we can best appreciate the logical and extremely coherent evolution that Josep Maria Subirachs carried out throughout his singular career: starting from an essentialist classicism of Mediterranean style, he would go through a radical abstract purification, to later derive in an unprecedented synthesis. His Venus of 1967 (see his public sculpture on the hill of Peñíscola), of which he made versions in bronze and marble, condense this search into a single image: the female body, without wanting to detach itself from its Mediterranean style, extends into an abstract mass whose rough surface links (almost as if it were the rings of a tree) the history of its conceptual development over time. In this way, the piece unites form and abstraction, time and space, reformulating the concept of beauty from its foundations. After entering the workshop of a gilder who was fond of sculpture at the age of fourteen, where he modelled his first works in clay, in 1942 he entered the workshop of the sculptor Enrique Monjó as an apprentice. Five years later he began to work as an assistant to Enrique Casanovas. In 1948 he showed his work for the first time at the Casa del Libro in Barcelona, and in 1950 he founded, together with other artists, the group Postectura. In 1951 he travelled to Paris to complete his training, with a grant from the Institut Français in Barcelona. He returned to Barcelona in 1953 and was awarded the Sculpture Prize at the Salon del Jazz. After two years working and exhibiting in Belgium he returns to Spain, and in 1958 he is awarded the Gran Premio San Jorge by the Diputación de Barcelona and the "Julio González" by the Cámara Barcelonesa de Arte. Since then he has been commissioned for a succession of public works, among which his important sculptural work on the façade of the Passion of the Sagrada Família stands out. He has held numerous solo and group exhibitions in Europe, Asia and the United States, and in 1988 he was awarded the Medal of Merit in the Fine Arts. In 1980 he was elected a member of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Jorge. He is represented at the Centro Reina Sofía, the MACBA Museums in Barcelona, Ibiza, Seville and New York, the Fine Arts Museums of Bilbao, Birmingham, the Vatican, Taipei and Nebraska, the Museo al Aire Libre del Paseo de la Castellana in Madrid, the Petit Palais Museum in Geneva and the Millesgärden in Stockholm, among others.