Untitled

After immigrating to Brooklyn at seven, and without having fluency in English, a young Federico Castellón turned to artmaking as a means of expression. At twenty, Castellón received a scholarship from his native Spain to study painting and printmaking in Paris and Madrid. There, his interests in Romantic poetry, psychology, and philosophy drew him to Surrealism. The movement’s emphasis on memories and the unconscious resonated with the artist’s experience upon returning to his childhood homeland: “I think the great moving thing was my revisiting Spain and awakening all sorts of strange things that came up, like finding I had a soul, because these memories became real all of a sudden….” Castellón produced this untitled drawing in Paris in 1935, at the height of his Surrealist engagement, as one of a set of six pen-and-ink drawings featuring mutating figures and symbolic objects in desolate, ambiguous landscapes.