Premiering at auction for the first time, a seminal sculpture by Manolo Valdés appears towering in Artnet’s inaugural "Art of the Americas" sale. Executed in 2006, only seven years after Valdés coined his signature Damas motif, the work synthesizes Iberian myth; poetically, pictorially, with enormously regal stature.

In his over-40-year career, Valdés has built great renown as a painter, though in the last two decades focused on stone and bronze, his sculptural practice has caught up supporting, if not surpassing, his extant presence on the international scene. Monumental public sculptures complement his small-scale, 3-D groupings in the Dialogo de Damas series, medium-sized and also expansive interpretations of the Infanta Margarita Teresa, in Diego Velázquez’s baroque, Las Meninas masterpiece.

Our example Doble Imagen, here is an absolute rarity. In 1999, the city of Valencia commissioned Valdés to create a public sculpture, in response to its infamous archeological treasure, the Dama de Elche. A female bust in 1897 excavated in the small town Elche, it’s an elemental part of the Valencian community. The figure was remarkably found in excellent shape, remaining since conserved in the National Archeological Museum of Spain, influential in Madrid. Inspired and stylistically related to the lot, Valdés’s ten-foot-tall La Dama was featured during 2002 in an outdoor exhibition on the New York Park Avenue malls, organized by the city.

Valdés's flat imagery rendering female visages recalls Matisse's style, and his multifaceted Meninas compositions demonstrate a new structural strain of creativity, continuing in the Damas. Sometimes his characters are named–Clio, Yvonne, and Ivy–while the Dialogo de Damas famously identifies three emotionally abstracted characters: the dreamer, the flirt, the realist.

Valdés has also imbued symbolism into his sculptures titled doble cara, “two-faced” like the Greek god Janus; only on rare occasions, the head physically appears duplicated, typified by Doble Imagen. Straight rods here interlace into crowns thorny, surrounding these two facially-smoothened, warrior busts; strong "dreamers" compositionally. Valdés has subsequently incorporated butterfly and fern forms to halo his heads spiritually, furthering this Golden Age, or ancient ethereality.

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