Balthazar Lobo began to contemplate motherhood, a central theme of his work, while on holiday in La Ciotat, France in 1946. Maternal love and the joyful interactions of mother and child inspired numerous works, executed throughout his long career, that explore the emotive dimension of human gestures.

Like many of his contemporaries, including Henri Laurens and Jacques Lipchitz, Lobo used the contours of the female form to explore abstract shapes and harmonies. Yet his abstraction moves beyond the visual, attempting to isolate the essence of that which is both subjective and universal: "My current work is, as always, figurative; which is to say that it is abstract. It necessarily begins with figuration. Simplified and synthesized, it...