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PROPERTY FROM THE COLLECTION OF A DISTINGUISHED FAMILY Estudio signed (lower left & verso) and dated 1965 (verso) oil on canvas 18 1/4" x 30" (46 cm x 76 cm) EXHIBITED The Luz Gallery, Fernando Zóbel: One-Man Exhibition of Paintings, Manila, March 19 - April 1, 1966. LITERATURE De la Torre, Alfonso and Rafael Pérez-Madero. Fernando Zóbel: Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings (1946 - 1984). Madrid: Fundación Azcona, 2022. Listed as nº "65-54 (M65-11)” with full-color photograph and painting description on page 321. "Estudio II." The Sunday Times, March 27, 1966. Black-and-white illustration. WRITE UP: Fernando Zóbel's Estudio comes from the artist's watershed exhibition at The Luz Gallery titled "Fernando Zóbel: One-Man Exhibition of Paintings" from March 19 to April 1, 1966. Estudio accompanied a series of works that showcased Zóbel's triumphant return to color, which he starkly abandoned in his Serie Negra period of 1959 to 1962. Zóbel painted Estudio in Manila, finishing the work on December 2, 1965. Estudio also came from the same year when Zóbel finally decided to establish his Museo de Arte Abstracto Español in Cuenca. It was in 1963 when the concept of establishing a permanent home for his collection of paintings formed within Zóbel's psyche. In April of 1963, Zóbel went to Toledo with artist-friend Gerardo Rueda, hoping to find a suitable location, but failed. After a few days, Zóbel was invited by another artist-friend, Gustavo Torner, "to spend the day in Cuenca to show him his house and take him around the city," as Villalba Salvador puts it. By June, the museum had begun to materialize, with Zóbel picking the location of the "Hanging Houses," which the Mayor of Cuenca, Rodrigo Lozano de la Fuente, had offered to the artist. The conception of the Museo de Arte Abstracto Español reinvigorated Zóbel's creative mind. And with the delight he found in the vibrant and historic city of Cuenca came the emancipation of colors in his canvas. Villalba Salvador notes: "Once he has decided to set up the Museum of Abstract Art in Cuenca, his trips to this city are constant; for years, it will be on the road and in the city that he will find most of his themes for landscapes, as in Tarancón (1964), Balcones (1964), Carretera de Valencia (1966) and many others which he will paint in the course of time. Little by little, the city and its surrounding area take possession of the painter, and Cuenca fills his notebooks, his pictures, and also his writing." Estudio exudes a meditative calmness that emanates from the composition's central core, characterized by swathes of blacks (reminiscent of the artist's Serie Negra) surrounded by varying gradations of burnt ochres. Do they evoke the ebb and tide of Zóbel's beloved Jucar as seen from one of the windows of his Cuenca studio, that majestic river running through the heart of Cuenca, which invigorated Zóbel so much and made him return to color once more? Spanish art and literary critic Juan Manuel Bonet writes in his essay Fernando Zóbel: Revisited that "Remember by painting" was "Zóbel's maxim." Maybe Zóbel, even though situated thousands of miles away from his dear Cuenca, wades in the ocean of his evocations as he begins to slowly immortalize the city and its river through his visual language of poetic lyricism. (Adrian Maranan)