Ángel Ferrant, son of the academic painter Alejandro Ferrant y Fischermans, chose to specialise in avant-garde sculpture and was one of the most important artists in Spain from the 1920s until the advent of Art Informel. In 1920 he moved to Barcelona, and that same year he visited the memorable Exposició d'Art Frances d'Avantguarda at Galería Dalmau, entering an artistic circle which, after the departure of Torres García, included the painter Rafael Barradas, the critic Sebastià Gasch and Joan Miró's close friend Joan Prats, among others. In 1933 Ferrant and Prats helped to found Amics de l'Art Nou (ADLAN), an association largely responsible for bringing the French avant-garde to Barcelona and Madrid, the city to which the sculptor returned in 1934.

Ferrant's varied and heterogeneous sculpture ranges from the modern realism of his work in the 1920s and early postwar years to the production of Surrealist objects in 1932, the return to objets trouvés in 1945 and, after 1940, to the precepts of changing statuary, his mobiles from 1948—an original alternative to Calder's invention—and the changing boards of 1950, venturing deeper into the territory of abstraction.

After the Spanish Civil War, new generations of artists looked up to Ferrant as a leading exponent of the avant-garde thanks to his work with the Altamira School, created in 1948 with his friend Matias Goeritz. At that time he began to produce works marked by primitivism, such as his Cyclopean Series, and joined the successful new wave of Spanish Art Informel. At the 1960 Venice Biennale he won the special prize awarded by the David E. Bright Foundation in Los Angeles for his Infinite Sculptures (1957 and 1958), iron pieces that explored the possibilities of mutable sculpture and drawing in space.

Toro-figura 6 [Bull-Figure 6] was presented at Galeries Syra in Barcelona in the 1957 exhibition Todo se parece a algo, shortly after Ferrant's serious accident in 1954 that had forced him to spend several years devoted solely to drawing. The piece reflects his interest in prehistoric art, which since the late 1940s had inspired Spain's avant-garde artists to strive for primitive forms and the idea of concretion and authenticity in their works. Yet it also offers a concept of open space animated by form, matured considerably by his dedication to drawing between 1955 and 1957. That design work allowed him to achieve bold compositions like Bull-Figure 6, a sculpture which, like others in the series, has the timeless quality of a totem, although it is not monolithic because of the importance attached to the void, which causes space to be transformed into the medium of sculpture, and the element that articulates it. In this respect, the work is a portent of Ferrant's imminent transition to iron, an excellent material for drawing in space. [Carmen Fernández Aparicio]