The sketch Woman with a Basket (1920-1923) by Julio González, the photo diptych Hug and Fight II  (1997) by Eulàlia Valldosera and the sculpture Branch (2001) by Blanca Muñoz are the latest works selected to join the Collection Highlights, a section of the website where we regularly showcase stand-out works.

As in the case of the previous update, which featured One-hundred Peseta Note (c. 1898), attributed to Mariano Fortuny y Madrazo,Poem of Prime Numbers (1983) by Esther Ferrer and Washing Away Time (2001) by Mireya Masó, we have again selected three works by Spanish artists dating from between the early 20th century and the first decade of the 21st. The Banco de España Collection numbers over 4500 works covering a wide range of periods, styles and formats, but a significant proportion are from the period featured here.

^{Julio González: Woman with a Basket (1920-1923)}

Woman with a Basket is one of three sketches in the Collection by Barcelona-born Julio González. The others are Landscape with Trees (1900-1906) and Seated Nude (1927-1928). All three are figurative works, and were acquired in 2001. This is a country scene sketched in pencil and water-colours in which González uses the iconic motif of a peasant girl, to which he later returned in a number of sculptures such as Small Profile of a Peasant Woman (1927) and a set based on La Montserrat, an archetypal humble mother figure who suffers the horror of war. Along with these three sketches the Banco de España Collection also includes a sculpture by Julio González called Long-stemmed Head (1932), one of his few works in bronze.

^{Eulàlia Valldosera: Hug and Fight II (1997)}

The second work featured is Hug and Fight II, in which Eulàlia Valldosera, winner of the National Award for Plastic Arts in 2002, creates one of her disturbing, blurry scenes alluding to the unseen violence that permeates everyday life. She uses two deliberately out-of-focus images of a man and a woman coming together and moving apart, making it impossible to be sure what the relationship is between them. This diptych evidences Valldosera's interest in light and in the human figure. The light on the two subjects in the photo seems to dematerialise them, creating a contradictory image open to different meanings that Beatriz Herráez describes as putting the spectator in the position of a voyeur witnessing an uncomfortable situation. The work highlights two important features of Valldosera's work: her concept of the (female) body as a symbolic construct which has been subjected to multiple forms of control and oppression throughout history; and her desire to establish an open dialogue with the spectator, to whom she often appeals directly.

^{Blanca Muñoz: Branch (2001)}

The third and final work selected is Branch by Blanca Muñoz. This sculpture is a paradigmatic example of the quest for weightlessness that characterises her work. It is marked by a constant search for balance between light and shadow, fullness and emptiness, movement and stillness. It stands three metres high and is made of stainless steel. Beatriz Espejo describes it as forming part of an exploration of fractals: mathematical models that describe and study objects and phenomena frequently found in nature that cannot be explained by classical theories. Muñoz’s investigation has led her to work with many branched forms as she delves further into her career-long dialogue with science, and more specifically with cosmological theories. This is one of her first works to allude to botany, which has become a core theme in her more recent output.