Profil (Marc Chagall)

Contemporary Spanish painter Manolo Valdés (b. 1942) began his career in the 1960s as one of the founding members of Equipo Cronica, a group of artists that utilised aspects of American Pop Art in their form of protest art against the dictatorship of General Franco in Spain. The group were also inspired by the way Pop Art challenged the traditional history of art and what it constituted, leading Valdes to appropriate images from across art history to explore in his own body of work.

Here, Valdés re-imagines the sitter from Fra Filippo Lippi's painting Portrait of a Woman with a Man at a Casement (c. 1440). Considered to be one of the defining works of Italian Renaissance portraiture, Valdés combines this classical artwork with a collage fragment of a painting by the Modern Master Marc Chagall. Valdés works to revitalise these familiar images from art history by taking them out of their original context. Here Valdés has inflated the figure's size, abstracting form and minimising the original detail, while incorporating rough mark making and collage.

Etching, aquatint, drypoint and collage in colours, 2008, on handmade paper, signed in pencil, numbered from the edition of eight, 122.7 x 92.5 cm. (48¼ x 36½ in.)