The sculptor Juli González learnt his trade in the metalworking studio his father owned on Rambla de Catalunya. He moved to Paris at the beginning of the twentieth century and devoted himself to painting and metalwork. It was not until the end of the 1920s that he opted definitively for sculpture and became a leading figure in the European avant-gardes. Spurred on by his friends Picasso and Gargallo, but above all thanks to hard work, he created a sculptural language of his own, the fruit of his formal experiments using iron. 'Still Life II' illustrates his masterly ability to combine matter and void and to extract unsuspected expressive possibilities from a simple sheet of iron.