Alberto Sánchez is one of the most relevant figures in 20th-century Spanish sculpture, whether we are referring to the avant-garde art produced in Spain until the end of the Civil War or to the art developed by Spanish artists in exile after that point.

A man of humble origins with no formal training whatsoever, he made a living as a baker in Madrid but eventually discovered his true vocation in art. In the middle of the first decade of the 20th century, he, along with Francisco Mateos, began to take an interest in the revolutionary power of art. His friendship with Rafael Barradas would be crucial after 1922, as he gave Alberto first-hand knowledge of the explosion of the avant-gardes in Spain and reinforced the social component of his painting.

At the 1925 exhibition of the Society of Iberian Artists, where Dalí, Palencia, Cossío, Ucelay, Moreno Villa and other young avant-garde artists were thrust into the limelight, Alberto showed his drawings and sculptures, which already incorporated Cubo-Futurist elements, for the first time. Between 1926 and 1928 he benefited from a grant awarded by the Provincial Council of Toledo, and in the early 1930s he began to teach drawing at a secondary school in El Escorial.

Shortly before the proclamation of the 2nd Republic, the sculptor from Toledo joined forces with Benjamín Palencia and Pancho Lasso to launch what we now know as the Vallecas School. From that time and up until the outbreak of the Civil War, many of the leading names of the glittering Republican art scene participated in that poetic experience. In fact, stage curtains made by Alberto using this visual language embellished some of the productions staged by the travelling theatre company La Barraca.

Forged on eye-opening strolls and rambles through the countryside near Madrid and Toledo in search of inspiration, Alberto's "Vallecan" poetics produced works that mixed and matched telluric, rural, grassroots, folk and suburban codes, expressed in a biomorphic language verging on Surrealist abstraction and capable of running alongside the most innovative trends in international sculpture. Many of those works disappeared during the Civil War and only exist in photographs, but the Stage design sketch for Cervantes's "Numancia" is one of the best surviving specimens.

Alberto's visual poetics were also present at the 1937 Exposition Universelle in Paris and informed his piece entitled El pueblo español tiene un camino que conduce a una estrella [The Spanish People Have a Path That Leads to a Star], the enormous, totemic sculpture that stood at the entrance to the Spanish Pavilion.

In 1938, Alberto left Spain for the Soviet Union. It was the beginning of a voluntary exile that would last until his death in 1962. At first he worked primarily as a stage designer, but after state control was relaxed in 1956 he went back to making sculptures and two-dimensional works, almost always in connection with monument projects. Many elements of the early Vallecas School style resurfaced during his Soviet phase and were interwoven with the inspiration provided by his new natural surroundings.

The rest of the pieces by Alberto in the Banco Santander Collection date from this latter period. They eloquently express that mental return to the fields of Vallecas, to the prominence of bulls, birds and human figures which still roamed that country in his memory, and to monuments he dreamed of inserting in nature. All of these characters belonged to a repertoire of images that also embraced the Russian countryside, tearing down borders to become something universal. [Jaime Brihuega Sierra]