MACA - Museum of Contemporary Art of Alicante presents the works by Julio González deposited at MACA by Florencio Martín, heir of Eusebio Sempere. These are significant works that demonstrate the importance of the collections that the Alicante artist gathered with the intention of increasing the 20th Century Art Collection but which unfortunately never reached this museum. Now, with this deposit, it is an unparalleled opportunity to fulfill his intention. These drawings by Julio González accompany the splendid works that the 20th Century Art Collection possesses: "Montserrat criant nº 2"; "Nature morte"; "Petit masque aéré" and "Petite maternité assise", expanding the Museum's vision of this artist. Julio González (1876-1942) Julio González is considered one of the great names in modern sculpture. He trained as a craftsman in artistic metalwork that his father had in Barcelona. His work with iron, with which he created his own language, has been valued as one of the most valuable contributions of the avant-garde movements of the thirties, although he only dedicated one decade of his life to creation with this metal. González began working with iron at the end of the twenties, when he was already over fifty years old, and although he had already worked with metal to create jewelry and various decorative objects, it was then when he began to create small reliefs in embossed copper and, later, to experiment with small sheets, creating heads and female figures. It was contact with Picasso, with whom he collaborated between 1928 and 1932, that allowed him to recognize the possibilities that iron had for sculpture. The artist from Málaga asked him in 1928 for technical collaboration in the creation of a series of iron works, among them a sculpture for a monument in homage to Apollinaire and Femme au jardin. His artisan origins, the knowledge of the possibilities that iron offered him, together with great imaginative freedom and the sensitivity of a great artist, allowed him to create a new, very personal language. He joined the avant-garde with new and powerful sculptural forms and a personal language, described as abstract, which had as its essential objective the marriage between forms and space. In his sculptures, space is part of the work itself, initiating a path that many other sculptors such as David Smith or Eduardo Chillida would later follow. González himself applied the term "drawing in space" to a part of his work, the one he created with iron bars or rods. The filiform or linear sculptures –what he himself called drawing in space–, the volumetric heads or the biomorphic figures are the result of work of great technical and conceptual rigor that would open the doors to recognition as one of the great sculptors of the 20th century.
