Femme au miroir 1937

Julio Gonzalez made this iron sculpture, "Femme au miroir," and what strikes me is how he builds a form out of what are essentially lines. It's like a drawing in space! Up top, there's this boxy head, almost like a birdhouse, with little spiky bits sticking out. It gives the piece a playful, almost cartoonish feel, but the dark metal keeps it serious. Then, the body is this elegant, elongated shape that seems to arch and bend. Check out the base of the figure, where the metal seems to curl around itself, creating this grounding point. It's like a tiny dance at the bottom of the sculpture. Gonzalez was a master of ironwork. He showed Picasso a thing or two about welding, and you can see how this piece is part of that conversation, how it relates to the Cubist idea of breaking down forms and building them back up in new ways. I love that the work is so open to interpretation.