In 1967, at the age of 19, Francesc Torres decided to leave Barcelona for Paris. Once there, he enrolled at the École des Beaux-Arts and the following year became an assistant to the Polish sculptor Piotr Kowalski, who worked with unconventional materials. ‘Sculptura’ captures the experimental spirit of this creative moment. How to transform the solidity of sculpture into the mutability of water? How to reinvent a traditional genre like sculpture? How to incorporate the word that designates the work? Torres takes a fishtank half-filled with water, onto which he floats some red plastic letters spelling the word S-C-U-L-P-T-U-R-A. At times, other words, or fragments of words, emerge. The artist incorporates the English term (Sculpture) but with a final “a” from the Latin ending. Talking about this apprenticeship with Kowalski, Torres explained in an interview in 1992: ‘With him I learned more than art: I learned to think and to recognise what I was doing and why I was doing it. (...) In short, that art could be anything I could imagine and that it was up to me to decide that it was.’