Barcelona-born Julio González (1876-1942) is one of the giants of 20th-century sculpture – up there with Arp, Brancusi, Maillol, Nadelman, and Giacometti. Tremendously influential, especially on Picasso – with whom González worked side by side for a time – as well as Calder, David Smith, and Anthony Caro, he was the first sculptor to work with iron.

This week “Julio González: Sculptures and Drawings,” a magnificent traveling show of roughly 40 rarely seen works from the Valencian Institute of Modern Art, opens at the Instituto Cervantes. Not since 1993, when the Guggenheim Museum mounted the exhibition “Picasso and the Age of Iron,” have we been offered such a large grouping of sculptures by the artist. If you are not already ga-ga for González, as I am, this intimate, one room retrospective should change your mind.

It is an absolute joy to move back and forth in the small show among very different-looking sculptures from various periods that, because they are all from the same hand, speak to and inform one another. They also give us a sense of the entire artist.

Born into a family of metalworkers, González revolutionized, if not reinvented, what we think of as sculpture. Using hammer and anvil, welding and cutting torches, he created Constructivist and Cubist works of iron that are at once figural and abstract – a merging of flora, fauna, and scrap metal. In doing so he brought sculpture up to date, wedded art with industry, and moved artists from the marble quarry, the bronze foundry, and the atelier to the junkyard, the hardware store, and the machine shop.

“Julio González: Sculptures and Drawings” is brilliantly selected and beautifully installed. Walking through the exhibition of drawings, jewelry, wrought iron flowers, masks, bas reliefs, and freestanding sculptures, I was enthralled or charmed by one masterpiece after another. González had a wide range. He was classical and expressionistic, delicate and lyrical, brutish and childlike.

The exhibit has key sculptures from throughout the artist’s career, such as “At the Fountain” (1927-29), “Mister Cactus [Cactus Man I]” (1939), and “Left Raised Hand n. 2” (1942). “At the Fountain,” a small, bent, curving sheet of wrought iron (cut, carved, and engraved) of a woman leaning over a fountain, is near a few earlier, figural repousses of embossed brass – “Pensive Peasant Woman with Basket,” “Mother and Child” (both c. 1924-26) and “Reclining Woman Reading” (c. 1927-28) – or embossed copper “Sitting Nude from Behind” (1927). “At the Fountain” was the first piece of iron González cut into, as he moved his sculptures from bas relief or sculpted mass toward what would soon become abstract, Constructivist configurations.

Mounted on the wall side by side are two beautiful wrought and welded iron sculptures, “Small Baroque Mask” (c. 1927-29) and “Head With Halo” (c. 1932). Both works are circular. The springy “Small Baroque Mask” is an oval iron plate, pointed at its chin, with cascading, unfurling ringlets that resemble a girl’s thoughts as much as they do her curly hair. Her eyes, made of horizontal and vertical bars, give the appearance of being both open and shut, as if they were fluttering. “Head With Halo” is an iron ring, that hangs from the wall like a doorknocker. Two overlapping, hard-edged geometric forms sit in the center of the ring and overlap it at its base, like a chin or pointed beard, and suggest open mouths and abstract faces.

From the center of the gallery, your eyes can graze freely from the tender, lovely terracotta “Standing Nude with Bowed Head” (c. 1910-14) – a Medardo Rossoesque sculpture of a woman, seemingly veiled or melting into her base, wringing her hair – to the rough-hewn yet pliant bronze “Worried Mask” (1913-14). Or you can move from the heavy, two-faced boulder of a sculpture “Head Double Head” (c. 1934-36) – which, though almost Cubist, looks as if it had been lopped off a medieval jamb statue – to the cast bronze “Flat Head Called ‘the kiss'” (1936) – an abstract freestanding neck and head of interlocking slabs that is as solid as an ax wedged deep in a tree. Or you can compare the willowy and windswept “Large Profile of a Peas ant” (c. 1934-36) – a rippling, wrought iron woman’s dress whose contours suggest faces – with the planar and linear, totemic bronze figure “Daphne” (1937).

The spectacular “Daphne,” an abstract sculpture in transformation – stepping, rising, and unfolding, seemingly turning itself inside out – merges woman, tree, and monument to Apollo. Leaning slightly, as if pushed by a breeze, it is both in midflight and sturdy as the trunk of a tree. “Daphne’s” upraised and arcing abstract arms, shooting out of stacked rectangles, suggest individual branches and the full canopy of the mature laurel. The volume of the big, round sun of Apollo can be felt in the sculpture’s void. The arms trail erect fingers or sprouts, forms that remind us of the movement and look of Cupid’s arrow or of hair flailing behind Daphne as she flees. A stiff bronze spear – root, arrow, and spine – anchors the weightless-seeming sculpture to its base.

Equally exciting are a number of other abstract sculptures. “Woman in Front of the Mirror” (c. 1934) is a wonderfully simple tubular bronze made of curves and right angles. “The Hair” (1934), a bronze half-circle that looks like a wide-open mouth, sprouts wild, spiked hairs that splay outward at the sculpture’s head like the wings of a bird of prey. “The Large Trumpet” (c. 1932-33) is a frightening bronze sculpture that resembles armor, swords, an old record player, a bear trap, and farm machinery. The two forms in the wrought and welded iron “The Lovers II” (c. 1932-33) have the simplicity of clasped hands. It looks like a sculptural bust and a cannon, in which a cutout figure appears to be rolling.

González created a whole new conflation of sculptural being – one that could exist only in our time. He saw in the iron scraps and tubing of the modern age Kandinsky’s points, lines, and planes. He transformed our industrial waste into art, allowing for us to see beauty in the most ubiquitous and mundane materials. “Mister Cactus [Cactus Man],” a wrought and welded iron sculpture of stacked, leaning, and armature-like forms, is oddly goofy and threatening. Parts of the sculpture resemble clubs with spikes. Other parts look like factory smokestacks or game pieces, and because of its crowns of thorns it also reminds me of an abstract St. Sebastian or crucifixion. Then again, it looks like a cactus.

González’s sculptures – which remind us as much of tools, weapons, abandoned machinery, and modern ruins as they do of sculpture – speak to a culture dependent on trains, planes, skyscrapers, and automobiles. Yet they feel equally ancient and mythic, as if they were forged in the Middle Ages or had been with us forever, as if they were strange, hybrid beings – a mixture of plant, man, animal, and machine.

Until June 18 (211 E. 49th Street between Second and Third Avenues, 212-308-7720).