Marlborough Gallery, New York
Acquired🍰 directly from the above by the pre🀅sent owner

New York, Marlborough Gallery, Manolo Valdés, 1991, p. 32, illustrated in colour

Valeria Bozal, Maneras de Mirar Mundos, Madrid 2001, p.143, illustrated in colour

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is warmer and richer, with the skin tone tending more towards a soft taupe, and more cherry pink undertones apparent in the figure’s clothes in the original. The catalogue illustration also fails to fully convey the heavy impasto paint and thick collaged elements apparent in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. Upon very close inspection, there are a few hairline drying cracks to some of the thicker areas of impasto paint. All surface irregularities are original to the artist's choice of medium and working process.
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Manolo Valdés' poꦐrtraiture actively engages with the history of art and addresses in it issues ranging from representation and appropriation to heritage, style and tradition. His distinctive method combines painting with sculpture and employs diverse materials and fabrics from which he recreates often familiar icons and motifs from art history in an immensely personal and richly textured manner of figuration.

Taking portraiture as his aesthetic code, Valdés examines the power of art and the unique expressive capacity afforded to it. In the present work, Portrait of Jane Seymour, Valdés takes his inspiration from one of Hans Holbein's most well-known historical portraits with the same title, executed in 1537. By magnifying the subject and replacing the classical techniques and careful detail with a bold use of rich, painterly material, Valdés creates an entirely new synthesis of form. Portrait of Jane Seymour surpasses realms of appropriation, combining instead inherited artistic idioms of the past with the formal and thematic concernꦦs of the present.

The execution of Portrait of Jane Seymour lays testament to Valdés' truly exemplary technical skill. Although it may seem a poised portrait at first glance, the energy and vigour created through the use of rough burlap, collage and thick oil, evokes a fierce expressionism and individualism. Valdés' Portrait of Jane Seymour revitalizes this infamou🗹s image by taking her out of her origina🙈l context and instead gives her a new complex and unique identity.

'I am just a narrator who comments on the history of painting in various ways, using new materials: it is like a game that coಌnsists of changing the code and the key to the artwork.... Many of my colours, materials and textures are the prod♛uct of relived experiences of other masters. My painting involves much reflection.'

The artist cited in: Exhibition Catalogue, Madrid, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, V🤪aldes 1981-2006, 2006, p. 21