Last Monday Josep María Subirachs (Barcelona 1927) passed away in Barcelona after a long neurodegenerative disease.

He was an artist of enormous talent, of international fame, and an undisputed protagonist of the Catalan sculptural scene for decades, with an extensive work focused primarily on sculpture but also including engraving, painting, scenography design and art criticism.

His work has experienced many stages throughout his life, evolving in a long way back and forth, from figuration to a greater abstraction to return again to figuration within a global attitude of a marked expressionist character always tinged with a marked symbolism.

Known, much to his regret, for having dared to measure himself against Gaudí in the continuation of the works of the Sagrada Familia with his project for the Passion façade of the then unfinished Barcelona temple, project always involved in the controversies that arose at the time, in the early 1990s, which included public demonstrations of rejection by the public in general and the official culture in particular that left a deep and painful mark on the artist. His work on the construction of the Sagrada Familia was framed in the eternal discussion about the character and identity that had to have or not the continuity of the works of a temple as unique as the one initiated by Gaudí and of which the architect Oriol Bohigas came to affirm that: the decision to continue the construction of the Sagrada Familia seems to me a barbarity, an artistic, cultural and civic error of the first order, that the sculptures of Subirachs come to complicate even more.

But we run the risk of focusing on the controversies surrounding the temple of the Sagrada Familia, and not remembering the best of Subirachs' career when bidding farewell to him. And it seems to me a good tribute to remember one of his first works, especially because it is on the Camino de Santiago: the sculptural ensemble made for the Sanctuary of the Virgen del Camino in León, which should be considered an essential piece in the evolution of Spanish sacred art in the second half of the twentieth century. Subirachs won in 1958 the competition organized by the Dominicans to 'enrich' the new temple then under construction, the work of the architect Fray Coello de Portugal. He carried out a frieze with thirteen gigantic figures of six meters high representing the apostles and the Virgin on a background of stained glass by Ráfols-Casamada, thematically reminiscent of the apostolate of Oteiza for Aranzazu; it is a brilliant set of course but less valuable than the bas-reliefs of the doors that are one of the highlights in our sacred art of the last century.

The bronze doors of three meters high and five meters wide in the main door, loaded with a dense symbolic richness with allusions to the life of the Virgin Mary and quotations from the Old and New Testament of a strong iconic character, are in the tradition of the best examples of access to the temples of Christian architecture. One of those hidden or less known works of contemporary Spanish art.

An example of an artist committed to his work who, as he did years later imitating Gaudí himself, lived while working in an apartment set up next to the Sagrada Familia, also in that project of León he lived for two months with the Dominicans in their convent to set his mood and motivate his spirit, according to the Navarrese Dominican and also artist Domingo Iturgaiz, witness of those years and partner also in the project of León.

Rest in peace.