EDUARDO ARROYO (Madrid, 1937-2018). Bag-sculpture... Lot 13

EDUARDO ARROYO (Madrid, 1937-2018). Bag-sculpture "La Africana" or "La maleta del Doctor Schweltzer", 1972. Black leather and metal structure. Polychrome wooden handles. Limited edition. Exemplary 13/30. Signed inside the bag. Measurements: 25 x 30,5 x 8,5 cm; 36,5 cm (height including the banana). Eduardo Arroyo brings out in his sculpture "La Africana" or "La maleta del Doctor Schweltzer" his most surrealist side, placing in contiguity apparently incongruous objects (a bag and a banana) which only thanks to an analogical exercise can manage to maintain some symbolic relationship. The artist created this work on the occasion of his exhibition "Opere e Operette" in Milan, which included all kinds of works from his production. He went to the flea market in the cosmopolitan city to buy 36 old bags, to which he added a banana. The duality of the title derives from two apparently distant concepts, albeit charged with great symbolic power and even related to each other; on the one hand, the "Africana", since all the titles of the exhibition "Opere and Operette" were taken from operas: Aida, the African, the Force of Destiny, etc. According to Arroyo himself, "Milan is very operatic and that had its charm"; as to the reason for "Schweltzer's Suitcase", Arroyo says "Dr. Schweitzer was a character that everyone thought was charming, but I never really liked him because the charity of Europeans on the black continent has always seemed suspicious to me. It is true that good things were done, but... Dr. Schweitzer had created some well-known hospitals in black Africa that made him very popular. A French author even wrote a play entitled Il est minuit, Docteur Schweitzer". The painter himself confesses that the work we present here is a totally daring and groundbreaking piece that only the bravest people dared to wear in Milan in the 1970s. A painter, sculptor and engraver, Arroyo stands out as an important figure in the neo-figurativist movement. After beginning his career in journalism, he began to paint in the late 1950s, appearing for the first time at the 1960 Salon de Pintura Joven. At the beginning of the 1960s his plastic vocabulary moved under the American influence of Pop Art, and in 1964 his break with informal art became definitive. In 1982 he was awarded the Premio Nacional de Artes Plásticas, and anthological exhibitions were held at the Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Arroyo is currently represented at the Museo Nacional Reina Sofía in Madrid, the Patio Herreriano in Valladolid, the Museo de Bellas Artes in Bilbao, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington D.C. and the Museo de Arte Moderno in Lille (France), among others.