Victor Salmones Signed Cast Bronze Reclining Nude with Raised Leg

One leg drives straight toward the ceiling. The back arches just off the ground. Both arms trail outward, fingers released. The head turns slightly, eyes closed — not collapsed, not exhausted, but concentrated. This is a body that knows exactly what it is doing. Victor Salmones spent a career finding these moments: the instant where physical discipline and human stillness arrive at the same place simultaneously.

This large-scale hollow cast bronze depicts a nude female figure in a pose that borrows equally from the dancer's floor barre and the athlete's core work — one leg vertical, the other planted at the knee, the torso lifted in a sustained bridge that demands everything the body has. The anatomical modeling is confident and naturalistic: defined musculature along the raised thigh, the gentle arc of the lower spine held just clear of the ground plane, a face turned with the particular calm of someone fully inside their own physical moment. Surface texture shifts register deliberately — smoother, more resolved passages across the torso and face give way to openly gestural, hand-worked handling along the limbs, the kind of surface variation that comes from a sculptor who understood that a figure in motion should read differently at different distances. The signature Victor Salmones is incised along the underside of one outstretched arm, numbered 1/10. At approximately 125 lbs and nearly four feet in each principal dimension, this is a work scaled for consequence — commanding in a garden, a courtyard, or any interior given enough room to breathe around it.

Victor Salmones (Mexican, 1937–1989) built one of the most widely distributed bodies of bronze sculpture of the twentieth century, with work held in museum, civic, corporate, and private collections across approximately thirty countries. Born in Mexico City to parents of Spanish ancestry, he discovered sculpture as a schoolboy modeling clay, then put himself through training by working in advertising before enrolling at the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes in the early 1960s. He mastered the traditional lost-wax (cire perdue) method and opened his own foundry and studio in Cuernavaca in 1966, later working out of Puerto Vallarta and Acapulco. His subject matter — graceful nudes, acrobats, families, tender human groupings — returned persistently to themes of love, physical grace, and shared humanity. His final and most ambitious commission, Cancer… There Is Hope, was funded by cancer-survivor philanthropist Richard Bloch and reproduced across more than twenty Cancer Survivors Parks throughout the United States and Canada; Salmones regarded it as the finest work of his life. He died in 1989. A monograph, A Sense of Human, was published posthumously in 1991.

Incised signature Victor Salmones and edition number 1/10 present on the underside of one outstretched arm.

CONDITION

Good overall, with the surface character of a bronze that has lived outdoors. Active verdigris bloom across the back, arms, and lower contact areas; warm copper-bronze patina retained on the upper-facing surfaces. Scattered pitting, oxidation spotting, and minor casting porosity throughout. Structurally sound and freestanding in the as-cast pose.

DIMENSIONS / SPECIFICATIONS

• Overall: 45" H × 44" W × 12" D
• Weight: Approximately 125 lbs
• Construction: Original hollow cast bronze
• Edition: 1/10
• Signed: Victor Salmones (incised, underside of arm)
• Patina: Natural verdigris and copper-bronze, consistent with outdoor display