Marina Núñez del Prado created works in indigenist and abstract styles in a series of media throughout her career and is celebrated among the most famous sculptors of twentieth-century South America. Núñez del Prado’s Madona de la Ternura (1946–1951), or Madonna of Tenderness, is a sculpture in mottled granite that sits at a midpoint in the artist’s career, between her early indigenist figures in wood and stone and her later organic abstractions in metal. It is a compelling image of mother and child rendered as Indigenous tenderness. The suppleness of the two bodies swaddled cocoon- like within the stone – only the features of their faces, one nuzzled against the other, visible within the opening – demonstrates the artist’s deft handling of the lithic medium. The sculpture is monumental yet intimate, Catholic and Aymara. Its material – albeit a form of granite not native to either Bolivia or Peru – evokes the telluric nature of Andean mythology and cosmology, and yet, with the choice of religious subject, Núñez del Prado made a place for herself and her Aymara “daughters” within the history of art.
—Lisa Trever
