Over the past several decades, Antonio Lopez Garcia has become known as the finest Spanish painter of his generation. His intensely realistic paintings—ranging in subject from grimy bathroom sinks to expansive Madrid cityscapes—often take him years of meticulous work to complete. These sculptures, and several other recent works by Lopez, were inspired by the birth of his grandchildren. When his second grandchild, Carmen, was a few months old, Lopez began modeling two portraits of her head, one depicting her awake and the other asleep.

In an interview given at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Lopez explained that these sculptures presented his first opportunity to work on a monumental scale. The process of transforming his intimate portraits into large-scale bronzes endowed them with an entirely different, unexpected character. “Your starting point is the representation of everyday life, and what is close to you,” he reflected, but “what is created becomes about many things, known and unknown.” Night and Day are now in the MFA’s permanent collection. Another slightly larger pair is located in the Atocha train station in Madrid, where they commemorate the victims of the 2004 terrorist train bombings.