FIGURATIVE SCULPTURES
“It was very hard to reach abstractionism” says Zélia Salgado in Abstract Aspirations (2002), a short documentary about her career. Effectively, only in 1949 and with the ultimate push of landscape architect and best friend Roberto Burle Marx she reaches out to space with strictly abstract forms (Aspiração Vertical nº1/Vertical Aspiration nº1). Until then, either on the “horrible academicism” which nevertheless granted her awards at the National School of Fine Arts or her bronze head statuettes, she still dwelled in the figurative world even already a bit bolder in painting (Bordadeira/Embroideress, oil on canvas, 1947). In 1953 though, with the bronze statuette appropriately named Serenidade/Serenity, she at truce with figurative sculpture.