José Cobo

JOSÉ COBO (Santander, 1958)
“Boy Leaning Against the Wall,” 2021, and “Crawling Boy,” 2022.
Resin and acrylic. One-of-a-kind pieces.
Signed and dated.
Measurements: 82 x 50 x 32 cm; 105 x 20 x 45 cm.
These two sculptures by José Cobo are part of his exploration of the child’s figure as a means of perceiving and understanding space. Far from being a merely anecdotal representation, the child’s body becomes a testing ground where learning, motor coordination, and the relationship with the environment are expressed as open-ended processes still in the making. In both pieces, the figures—one leaning against a vertical plane and the other in mid-movement—articulate different forms of contact with the physical world, highlighting the tension between balance and instability. This quality is reinforced by the deliberate distortion of proportions and the use of intense colors, which heighten the sculptural presence and accentuate their almost suspended nature. The result is a sculptural ensemble that represents the body in transit, where the playful and the perceptual intertwine without hierarchy, consolidating one of the constants in Cobo’s artistic language: the understanding of the body as an active tool for exploring space.
Trained at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he earned a Master of Fine Arts in Sculpture, Cobo has developed an international career that has taken him to cities such as Chicago, New York, and Frankfurt, integrating into his artistic language a contemporary sensibility marked by formal synthesis and the tension between figuration and abstraction. His teaching experience at SAIC itself helped consolidate a sculptural practice attentive to both conceptual processes and material experimentation. Recognized with honors such as the Botín Foundation Fellowship (1994), the Cantabria Fine Arts Prize (2014), and the international commission for the permanent installation *Wächter* at Arche Nebra (Germany, 2021), José Cobo currently works out of Santander.