Untitled (Memory I), 1971. Oil on linen. 92 × 73 cm.
Lot 001 · Paintings
Untitled (Memory I)
Elena Vasquez
Year
1971
Medium
Oil on linen
Dimensions
92 × 73 cm
Estimate
NZD 18,000–24,000
A commanding example of Vasquez's mature period, this work belongs to the series she produced between 1969 and 1974 in her Madrid studio following the death of her mother. The surface is built from at least twelve distinct layers of oil, the uppermost passages scraped back to reveal warm ochre and raw umber beneath. The composition resists easy reading — forms emerge and dissolve, suggesting landscape, figure and interior simultaneously. The title, assigned by the artist in her studio ledger, is the first in a sequence of five works exploring involuntary memory.
Artist
Elena Vasquez
Elena Vasquez (b. 1938, Seville; d. 2009, Madrid) was one of the most significant voices in post-war Spanish abstraction. Trained at the Escuela de Bellas Artes de San Fernando under Antonio López Torres, she developed a language of dense, layered pigment that drew on the ochre landscapes of Andalusia. Her work entered major European collections during the 1970s and was the subject of a retrospective at the Museo Reina Sofía in 1994. Vasquez described her practice as "painting against forgetting" — each canvas an act of recovery rather than invention.