Tag: sculpture

Ydessa Hendeles

Two Installations by Ydessa Hendeles

In a distinguished career as gallerist, collector and curator before she started to make her own works, Ydessa Hendeles has fashioned a distinctive space in the contemporary art world. Internationally renowned as a pioneering exponent of curating as a creative artistic practice, her groundbreaking work is widely discussed and embraced as a model by leading members of the new generation of curators emerging today. In her exhibition making and artistic practice, Hendeles often explores notions of difference and diversity, and especially the way representation and distortion, appropriation and assimilation can filter group and individual identities.

The Top Six Images:  “From Her Wooden Sleep”, 2013, utilises display to create a narrative space where appearances and roles are distorted. A vast collection of pseudo-human wooden mannequins, each subtly unique in size and expression, is arranged within its own gallery. These figures seem to form a distinct community, and confronted by them the visitor is suddenly cast in the position of ‘outsider.’

Despite their human likeness, shared characteristics of the mannequins separate them as a group, and their collective stare isolates the visitor, transforming him or her from the observer to the observed, the guest to the interloper. This space of distorted roles and perceptions is enhanced by a series of funhouse mirrors that line the perimeter of the space, contorting the reflections of visitors and making direct reference to the untrustworthy nature of representation.

The Bottom Four Images:  “Partners (The Teddy Bear Project)”, 2002,  is a vast display comprising more than 3,000 family-album photographs of people posing with teddy bears, alongside display cases that contain antique stuffed animals. The installation adopts the toy as symbol for the consolatory and encouraging power of artworks, and highlights the relationship between people and their objects of affection.

The Motya Charioteer

The Motya Charioteer, Marble, Greek Origin, 460-450 BC, Found on the Sicilian Island of Motya in 1979, British Museum

The ‘Charioteer’ is a very rare surviving example of an original Greek victor’s statue and is believed to represent the winner of a chariot race that took place some 2,500 years ago. He was found in 1979 amid excavations on the tiny island of Motya on the western tip of Sicily, which was a Phoenician stronghold in ancient times and a region renowned for breeding horses.

The statue has been identified as a charioteer because of the long tunic he is wearing, the xystis. It was a garment that covered the entire body, and was fastened with a simple belt. Two straps crossed high at the racers back preventing the fabric from “ballooning” during the race.

The broad belt on to which the reins would have been fastened – on the statue were secured via fixings in the two holes in the belt at the front. This prevented the reins from being pulled out of the hands, but also dangerously, prevented the charioteer from being thrown free in any crash.

Today this amazing sculpture is regarded as a national treasure by Sicilians and thought by many to be one of the finest surviving examples of a classical sculpture anywhere in the world. It resembles the more famous Delphian charioteer, which is not very much older.

Jame Jones

Jame Jones, “Beyond the Edge of Reason”, Stainless Steel, 3 Meters Wide

James Jones is fascinated by our ever changing notion of consciousness. By creating forms that juxtapose the scientific with the spiritual, the philosophical with the biological, James explores our belief systems and the systems within the mind/body that create our experience of the universe. The interrelated concepts of unity; opposites; balance; the internal and external; micro and macrocosms; the self and the soul are also examined through his sculptural work.

James’s recent sculptures involve the use of “zeros” and “ones” that can be seen as a metaphor for mutually dependent dualities such as on-off, male-female, all-nothing. By combining this visual language with a variety of forms, James attempts to further question our notion of consciousness.

Ricardo Beliver

Ricardo Beliver, “Fuente del Angel Caído”, Fountain of the Fallen Angel, Bronze, 1877-78, Buen Retiro Park, Madrid, Spain

The statue that crowns the monument in the center of the fountain is the masterpiece of Ricardo Beliver who realized it in plaster in 1877 while a 3rd year pensioner in Rome, inspired by verses from the first Canto of Paradise Lost by John Milton. He submitted it to the 1877 edition of the Exposiciones Nacionales de Bellas Artes where it received the first prize.

The state acquired the work and presented it to the 1878 Expostion Universelle. Since only works in bronze and marble were accepted, the statue was cast in bronze at this occasion and the plaster original destroyed. The statue returned to Spain in what was then the Museo Nacional de Pintura y Escultura, also known as the Museo de la Trinidad, and now part of the Museo de Prado. The director of the museum, Benito Soriano Murillo, proposed its relocation in the open space of Buen Retiro Park so that the public could freely enjoy this peculiar and unusual creation.