Baltasar Lobo
b. 1910, Cerecinos de Campos, Spain
d. 1993, Paris, France
Baltasar Lobo was a Spanish avant-garde sculptor. Born in Cerecinos de Campos in Zamora, Spain, at the age of seventeen he received a scholarship to study at the Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid. As a student, Lobo frequently visited the Museo Arqueológico, where he studied the aesthetic vocabulary of Iberian sculpture. However, in 1939, at the height of the Spanish Civil War, Lobo fled to Paris. There he met fellow Spaniard, Pablo Picasso. Picasso in turn introduced him to the Paris School of artists, including Jacques Lipchitz, Julio González and, most significantly, Henri Laurens, who took Lobo in as his studio assistant. However, Lobo also continued to make his own work around his signature theme: formal properties of the female body. Of his work, he said enigmatically: "My current work is, as always, figurative; which is to say that it is abstract. It necessarily begins with figuration. Simplified and synthesized, it becomes abstraction. By simplifying this reality I distill its emotion, coming to feel and communicate it more directly."
Lobo became a highly accoladed sculptor, exhibiting alongside Laurens and Picasso, as well as Fernand Léger and Henri Matisse. He received the André Susse Sculpting Award (1958), the Jacques Lenchener Award (1974), the French Official Arts and Letters Award (1981), the National Award for Plastic Arts (1984), the Gold Medal Award Castilla y Leon (1986), the Andres Bello Award given by the government of Venezuela (1989), and the Gold Medal Susse Fréres Fondeul (1990). His work can be found in public collections around the world, including the Centro d'Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; the City Museum of Modern Art, Paris; the Tokyo National Museum; the Museum of Modern Art, Luxembourg; and the National Gallery, Prague.