Beschreibung:

Å Igor Mitoraj “Ikaria con Colonna” (Icarus on a Column) 1991,Bronze, 1 from an edition of 3,variegated green brown patination,412cm.; 162ins high by 120cm.; 47ins square at the base, Igor Mitoraj was born on 26th March 1944 at Oederan Germany. His mother had been deported from Poland for slave labour. His father, a French officer of the Foreign Legion, was interned in Germany as a prisoner of war. When the War ended he and his mother returned to Poland to his grandparents. Mitoraj went to an art secondary school in Bielsko-Biala, and after finishing it, in 1963 enrolled in the Cracow Academy of the Fine Arts. In 1968 he left for Paris to attend the École Supérieure des Beaux Arts. Fascinated by the culture of South and Central America, he spent a year in Mexico, where he made his first sculptures. In 1974 he returned to Paris and held his first solo exhibition at the Galerie La Hune, which was a tremendous success. Important awards like the Prix de la Sculpture were conferred on him and in recognition, the French minister of culture presented him with a studio at Bateau Lavoir Montmartre. In 1979 a few months’ stay in New York, the Mecca of contemporary art, confirmed Mitoraj’s conviction that he was a European artist. He travelled to Greece to study ancient sculpture in detail. In 1983 Igor Mitoraj set up a studio at Pietrasanta, near Carrara in Italy and four years later he decided to live there permanently. In 1986 he was invited to contribute to the 42nd Venice Biennale. His 1989 exhibition in the New York Academy of Art brought Mitoraj acclaim from the American public and critics. The following years were full of individual exhibitions; over 160 of them, including shows in Italy, Sweden, Spain, Great Britain, the USA, Canada, Poland and Germany. Mitoraj’s exhibitions in the Museo Archeologico and in the Boboli Gardens in Florence in 1999 and in the Olympic Museum in Lausanne in 2001 were world-class events. His works are to be found in major public museums and private collections including the forecourt of the British Museum where one of his monumental bronze classical heads was placed following the remodelling of the Central Court., In classical mythology, Icarus was the son of the master craftsman Daedalus, who tried to escape from Crete by means of wings that his father constructed from feathers and wax. He ignored instructions not to fly too close to the sun, and the melting wax caused him to fall into the sea where he drowned. , Mitoraj’s sculptural style is rooted in the classical tradition with its focus on the well modelled torso. However, Mitoraj introduces a post-modern twist with ostentatiously truncated limbs, emphasising the damage sustained by most genuine classical sculptures. In this piece he has changed Icarus into a woman and has placed the broken wing at the bottom of the column next to some carpenter’s tools since in Pliny’s Natural History, Daedelus is credited with inventing carpentry. , As one critic observed; “Igor Mitoraj is one of those sculptors who still show the human figure full of mystery, a poetic force, and a sophisticated beauty. Fascinated by the beauty of the ancient sculpture, he creates figures of heroes, gods and goddesses, mythical characters. His Icarus, Ikaria, Iphigenia, Hypnos, the Gorgon, the Centaur, Eros, Mars cast in bronze or sculpted in marble, are delighted for their ideal proportions, for the perfection and beauty of their shapes.”, “Looking at my work now, I am increasingly convinced that the art of the ancients has always been an ideal for me and harbors a nostalgia for a paradise lost” , Exhibited: Milano, “Igor Mitoraj”, Catello Sforzesco ,1991, Literature: Mitoraj: Krakow, Paris, Rome, Miedzynarodowe Centrum Kultury, Krakow, 2006 , This lot is sold with original photographs, one certified and signed by the sculptor and dated 1991.,