Antonio Saura — Cabeza (Signed screenprint c.1970)

This screenprint by Antonio Saura, created circa 1970 and signed in pencil, is part of his defining Cabezas series—a brutal and necessary fragment of Spain’s postwar avant-garde. One of 125 impressions, it anchors a historical moment when figuration collapsed under psychological weight and political fracture.

Saura, born in Huesca in 1930, emerged from the shadows of civil war and dictatorship, giving form to a raw internal landscape. A founding member of the El Paso group, he refused formal harmony in favour of something closer to psychic excavation. In Cabeza, the human head is reduced to a violent cluster—an eye, a mouth, a snarl—trapped in the language of black, white and grey. The figure is neither portrait nor mask, but a site of rupture. The flatness of the screenprint method intensifies the sense of compression, as if the image had been forced onto the paper with the same urgency as a cry.

The stark triangular mass of the body, emerging from the bottom edge like a shroud, evokes both monument and disappearance. Suspended in a grey field and framed with graphic restraint, the print feels both timeless and urgently present—an icon of expressionist resistance and a relic of interior struggle. This is Saura at his most distilled: wounded, articulate, and unflinching.

Technical Sheet
Title: Cabeza (Head)
Artist / Author: Antonio Saura
Date: c.1970
Technique / Printing Method: Screenprint
Medium / Materials: Ink on paper
Edition: 81/125
Signed: Yes, signed and numbered in pencil
Framing: Metal frame with white mount
Dimensions (cm): 76 × 56 cm (sheet) / c.100 × 80 cm (framed)
Condition: Excellent — slight age toning to mount