ABSTRACT SCULPTURES
“Make it big, Zélia, BIG!!!”
With this sentence, declared by Roberto Burle Marx around 1949, Zélia Salgado would abandon her small and coy head statuettes to dare in a series of aspirations: Aspiração Vertical nº1/Vertical Aspiration nº1 would come to the world from that initial pulsation, an imposing 2-meter (6 feet) high bronze sculpture, displayed at the II São Paulo Biennial in 1953 and sold to Mr. Andrew Silver in 1965. “It stands before a Frank Lloyd Weber designed home in Boston”, she always proudly quoted. Zélia preferably worked bronze but also brass, steel, iron, stone and soapstone; only once aluminum – with which she was awarded Silver Medal at the IV Modern Art Saloon of São Paulo, in 1955. She was not intimidated by tearing abstractionism out of them (Pedra/Stone, 1955); with size (Aspiração Vertical/Vertical Aspiration, steel, 1971, Col. Itamaraty, Brazil) or even getting back to reduced dimensions in Serenidade II/Serenity II, a 1965 bronze. The Composições em Aço Inox/Compositions in Inox Steel, of 1959 – sadly “lost” during an international itinerant exhibition in the 1970s – show the strength of her message, in a dialogue with the entire informal Abstractionism movement (see here), as well as the series of little bronze statuettes done from the 1960s onward.
Steel Aluminum Bronze Brass Stone Soapstone