Festival Visual Artist

Each season, Music@Menlo invites a distinguished visual artist to display work which complements the festival’s theme, on-site and in festival publications. For the festival’s sixteenth season, titled Creative Capitals, we will feature the works of sculptor Gonzalo Fonseca.

Gonzalo Fonseca (1922–1997) understood sculpture as a microcosmic way to engage civilization and weave together past and future. Integrating the forms that he encountered in his extensive travel, Fonseca resisted the narrower tracks of mid-twentieth-century Modernist sculpture and instead dedicated himself to expanding its landscape. He carved his stones himself, without the aid of assistants, and often worked with found stone. Uruguayan-born, he divided the majority of his life between Manhattan and a hilltop studio among the quarries and stone-working communities in Northern Tuscany. Gonzalo Fonseca produced hundreds of paintings and drawings and executed a number of monumental public works. A documentary focused on Fonseca, titled Membra Disjecta: Gonzalo Fonseca and the Heart of Stone, comes out in 2018. For further information, visit www.gonzalofonseca.com.