Luisa Granero ranks among Spain’s most significant twentieth-century sculptors. Her Catalan origins explain the special sensibility she developed towards Mediterranean culture, a feature particularly visible in her female nudes, which also show the artist’s love for the formal beauty of classical art. The direct link with tradition was further reinforced by the refinement, sobriety and balance that instil in her works the restrained expressiveness characteristic of contemporary sculpture.

Throughout her career, Granero’s visual language was predicated on the figure of the Mediterranean woman, achieving a perfect symbiosis of the influence of three great sculptors: Aristide Maillol (1861-1944) and the artists Manolo Hugué (1872-1945) and Josep Clarà (1878-1958). From them Granero learned the sense of corporeity, as well as the monumental, solemn, sensuous and balanced features of her works, whose pensive quality is highly modern.

As one can see here in Desnudo, mujer tumbada (Nude, Reclining Woman), rather than archetypes, her female figures represent emotions and human virtues, conveying a sense of harmony, serenity and a personal spirit. Inspired by Mediterranean energy, they attempt to render the aesthetic message of everyday life through heightened sincerity. Granero goes beyond a mere copying from the model: her structural conception combines her admiration for neoclassical art and her will to supress anything unnecessary in order to create sculptures charged with purity and freedom.

Granero’s main goal was always to convey her passion to create from her inner world, to sincerely reflect her own personality, removed from all sophistication. Each one of her pieces is a true example of the great lesson of Michelangelo (1475-1564): the power of sculpture must radiate outwards from inside, and it is precisely in that aspiration were its main difficulty lies. Granero manages to supress the superfluous, without reaching abstraction or forsaking the human shape, transcending the material in order to conquer the soul of the public.