Baltasar Lobo

Cerecinos de Campos (Zamora), 1910 – Paris, 1993

Baltasar Lobo, Spanish sculptor and prominent member of the so-called historical avant-garde. The son of a carpenter, in 1922 he entered the Ramón Núñez Art Workshop in Valladolid as an apprentice. A few years later, in 1927, he left the workshop to enter the San Fernando Academy of Fine Arts and at the same time the School of Arts and Crafts.
His work has been characterized by the constant search for the purity of volumes and the reduction of forms following the work of artists such as Arp and Brancusi. Lobo took the figure of the woman as a recurring motif and theme in his work, although he also worked on other themes such as animals, but to a lesser extent. His pieces began to be shown in Europe and America in the mid-1940s, when he participated in the Masters of Contemporary Art exhibition at the Galerie Vendome in Paris. But it was from the 70s onwards that he acquired greater international relevance.
The materials with which he worked were clay, wood and in the end marble and metal. He received numerous awards such as the André Susse for Sculpture (1958), the Official Prize for Arts and Letters of France (1981), or the National Prize for Plastic Arts of Spain, Castilla-León Gold Medal (1984), among others. His work can be found in important collections such as the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Madrid), the Musee d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (Paris), the Museum of Contemporary Art Sofía Imber (Caracas), the Museum of Bilbao (Bilbao), the Tokyo Museum (Tokyo), or the National Museum of Norway (Oslo), among others.