El ángel caído, 1983

José Hernandez  

Dated 1983 and issued in an edition of seventy-five copies, The Fallen Angel belongs to the mature period of José Hernández (1944-2013), the Tangier-born Spanish painter and printmaker whose work constitutes one of the most sustained fantastic visions in late twentieth-century Spanish art. Hernández was a printmaker of unusual seriousness, and his graphic production, closely bound to his work as an illustrator of Kafka, Cortázar and Sade and as a designer for theatre and film, developed a repertoire of hybrid anatomies, mineral surfaces and enclosed spaces that owe as much to Bosch and Bracelli as to Surrealism. The subject of the fallen angel, the figure expelled from grace and suspended between the celestial and the corporeal, is central to that imagination. The horizontal sheet measures 45 by 64 centimetres. Hernández received the Premio Nacional de Artes Plásticas in 1981, two years before this print, and his work is held by the Museo Reina Sofía and the Biblioteca Nacional de España.