(Picasso and I) / 1985 / Terra-cotta and acrylic / Approximately 58 x 30 cm / Artist: Julie Lluch / Gilda Cordero-Fernando collection

Lluch works in painted terra-cotta as sculptural medium. Much of her sculpture deals with woman’s experience and the feminist drive to identity and self-determination. Si Picasso at Ako, which shows a woman in her familiar traditional role as family cook, can be seen in the context of her feminist concerns. It portrays a harried housewife throwing her hands up in despair at the burnt fish in the frying pan. Like her bust portraits and other works, it reveals a remarkable sensitivity to the portrayal of emotional states. Her hair in disarray, her face ruddy with kitchen heat, and her mouth gaping in distress, the woman is every woman as housewife, while the burnt fish on the pan is the daily disaster with which she must cope.

Sometimes the artist creates a group composition with other figures, such as a little girl watching and perhaps being initiated into woman’s traditional role, a dog wantonly scratching itself in the belly, and the figure of the male chauvinist indifferent to woman’s plight. Symbolism has marked much of Lluch’s latest works, in an effort to express the subconscious layers of woman’s plight in its nonrational, intuitive, emotional aspects, particularly her fears and aspirations. While this work implies a woman still caught in narrow traditional roles without access to creative options, in many of her works Lluch has explored images signifying woman’s awakening consciousness of herself as an independent and self-determining person.