As he investigates the primitive aspect of our nature, the sculptor arrives at the pristine aspect of an animal, which is its sacred manifestation. This “sacredness” of an animal, usually worshiped and glorified from the dawn of mankind, is brought to the forefront again here. The sculptor builds his own private temple for the animals, the way monkey temples were built in India, or jaguar sanctuaries were created in Mexico.

The big animals retain their most static, archaic dimension. Beasts such as elephants, hippopotami, or gorillas are sacred “prophets” in the sculptor’s personal symbolic language. He gives a perpetual moving energy to their mass as exemplified in the voluminous sculptures of the beasts David chooses to create. The sculptor freezes the beasts in an instant in which the animal’s energy manifests itself. As the result, the sculpture’s power is embodied in that reduced and minimized momentum. The sculptor formally divides his work into three categories of sacred priests, warriors, and terrestrial beings.

However, his bronzes, taking forms such as Darwin or a Zoroastrian prophet, deny all the categories: ontologically they nourish the idea of the embryo and its metamorphosis. The sculpture tells us the story about our birth and development on earth where the fallen Adams and Eves give in to earthly pleasures.

The series of “Prophets” includes mythical beings—an orangutan who is a Pharaoh, an Asian elephant who is mightier than Ganesh, an African marabou invoking prophecies, a study of a hand escaped from Michelangelo’s studio, and a fortune-telling mouse. Even the prince of darkness Satan himself appears in a sculpture entitled Batman, and again in Dark Prince, which is a graceful bronze of a scorpion. However, all of these “ animals,” being already pure in their essence, do not evoke the Aristotelian notion of catharsis.

The binding element in all of them is humor, which ranges from Daumier’s grotesque, with the Pharaoh, to the Surrealist joke, as exemplified in the insects and smaller animals in Hadrien’s theater of “earthly delights.”

Many of these sculptures openly originate from images drawn from Biblical tales. The animals are really princely creatures for him, thus the story of the Dark Prince or the story of a fallen angel who dabbles with religions and terrorist actions, and who is our “next-door neighbor” out there to kill or undermine our desires.

In contrast to these concrete figures from the animal and the animated world, there stands a long 2.4 meter totem made in mortar, which serves as an abstract “animus” for the sculptor, representing his interior as a process of constant transformation. During the years of the demanding work with bronze as material, Hadrien David has acquired and developed his own themes—from Michelangelo he takes a muscular precision mixed with a lyrical beauty, which is the manner in which he works on his torsos. Gericault had inspired his approach to horses, and Degas’ dancers and choreography informed his approach to smaller animals.

A cinema-inspired approach is also very characteristic of the sculptor’s work. The group of “Warriors” consists of powerful animals; white leopards, bulls, running horses, jaguars, and apes. Here, the warrior’s stance is manifested in an upward movement through the air. These beasts are never quite static as they embody the essence of the movement itself. This exceptional quality in David’s work makes a clear distinction between his sculptures from a great number of artists who have worked within the same genre.

There is an erotic force in his forms, as their muscular mass takes over the space they inhabit. On view here is a certain Husserlian notion of epoche, a sort of suspending of the “natural attitude” toward the object that we experience. In order to get us into this state of suspension that we have in relation to an animal, the sculptor does an in-depth “dissection” of the model. This approach was observed by the old masters, but it has all but completely disappeared over time. He is influenced by the Classical Greek art and their approach to sculpture. The frog is, perhaps for him, the animal that expresses the plasticity of the body most dynamically.

Hadrien David’s harmonic vision is at its best in his “terrestrial” group, obeying the perpetual rites of fecundity including gorillas (Adam’s Temptation), dancing frogs (The Egyptian), and kangaroos (The Athlete). As all these animals belong to the same earthly parade, the sculptor places them in an unusual setting within his work The Doors of Paradise. It is here that his work resembles more the work of a theater director who places the scenes into a certain sculptural setting. Here he approaches both the Surrealist cinema of Jan Svankmajer or Antonin Artaud’s theater of cruelty.

Hadrien’s sculptures, thus, are both real and surreal. Their reality comes from the feeling that sculpture is the stomach of our history, and as the history of sculpture is his life-story, it is also the story of his multilayered presentation of the past combined with the present.

By Nina Zivancevic

The post Solidified Dynamics: New Animals with Hadrien David appeared first on NY Arts Magazine.

Courtesy of Matthew Marks Gallery.

Ken Price: Large Sculptures
May 9 – June 28, 2014
Matthew Marks Gallery
522 W 22 Street
502 W 22 Street
New York City
matthewmarks.com

The post Ken Price at Matthew Marks Gallery appeared first on NY Arts Magazine.

Image courtesy of the artist.

In my work I follow the traditional form of sculpture but also include some modern elements. A human in a calm, contemplative state, deep in dream or meditation is the most interesting theme for me. I strive to transfer into my sculptures the human world inside its own mind, when one is calm inside his own world.

I work intuitively, with no pre-conceived plans. I don’t analyze what my work means or try to express any particular idea. A visual image comes to me, and I make a sketch. When I start sculpting, it often changes, taking on a life of its own and sometimes developing into something quite different. Materials are important. An unexpected juxtaposition of contrasting materials, like bronze and glass, attracts and inspires me. I think the creative process is a part of my quest for self- knowledge.

alexander.tsalikhin

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It is difficult not to see this exhibition as a competition of interests and the interesting; the very personalities of both artists are quite evident—one only needs to look at the photographs in the exhibition of both artists’ studios to see the yawning chasm between them. A curatorial decision that seems to play more to their differences than similarities, we are reminded that the cult of personality also comes to bare; as the viewer brings a foreknowledge of the infamy of one of these artists as well as of his art. The show brings together a gilded gutter life in Soho with the life of a fellow of the British Academy and a public figure. As one enters this exhibition, passed the photographs of Bacon’s Reece Mews studio, with its paint-strewn shambolic glamour, paired with photographs of the sedate and organised ‘school room’ of Moore—the scales of personality are already tipping in Bacon’s favour.

There are two ways in which you can view this exhibition. If prejudice is left at the door along with the misguided cult of personality, comparison of the very dichotomy of these artists can lead to the recognition of shared formal concerns; faces lost, distorted, or abstracted. Identity for both artists was at times even non-existent; as the likeness of an individual was of no importance to either man, yet the physicality of the human body, and the subsequent abstraction of form and shape is of paramount importance to both artists visions. What at first are diametrically opposed works do on occasion give way to familiar aesthetic concerns of the shape and weight of the figure.

But it is hard to balance these two artists’ works. Bacon’s feverish sacks of meat are positively fervent set against Moore’s stolid immovable incapacity; Moore is like a muted child being out-screamed by a naughty sibling.

Where Moore regains footing, however, is in his drawing. This has a dynamism that, frankly, I can never find in his sculpture; a sense of movement and even urgency that reflects at least an aspect of the supine, frail flesh all around it. Moore he reflects upon war, it is the only occasion for the artist where he is less kind to the reality of the human form, with slight echoes of Baconian angst. Moore’s tepid beauty receives more pain than is usual and becomes all the more vivid for it— both artists having been influenced in their own way by the realities of war.

For the most part, Moore’s human condition is concrete solidity; the unbreakable skeleton shrouded in bronze—here juxtaposed with Bacon’s fleeting and bloodied flesh. His painting appears both “bruiser and bruised”—and if viewed as a boxing match between these two giants of British Art, Moore’s fair play is taken advantage of at every opportunity by Bacon.

The second way of viewing this exhibition, and secret to finding its success, is in trying to imagine that Moore’s sculpture is the three-dimensional result which—in some ways at least—of which Bacon has often dreamt. This is expressed in a very sculptural style of painting, and equally expressed by a drunken Bacon, who at one time actually turned up at Moore’s door demanding lessons in sculpture. In fact, the similarities between Bacon’s sculptural figures and Moore’s curve of form are often prescient as highlighted by Richard Calvocoressi and Martin Harrison’s curatorial decisions, even made almost too obvious on occasion.

Installation view courtesy of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford University.

There is no denying the comparison between these two artists; Moore’s King and Queen reside as a seemingly permanent weight beside Bacon’s Pope Innocent X. A surface reading of this juxtaposition reveals certain formal similarities between the sculptural heads and the painted; yet that raw kinetic vision of Bacon again causes the once timeless, osseous matter of Moore’s work to melt away before your very eyes.

Bacon’s Lying Figure and Moore’s Reclining Figure share a striking visual collaboration; but Moore’s sculpture is a physical reality whereas Bacon’s figure is a theatrical construct placed in its own caged environment—and is all the more powerful for its decadent sanguineous fantasy. In that sense Bacon’s fictional sculptural figures behave like objects in an installation—an object within its own universe—as opposed to Moore’s sculptures that are forever separate and reside in our own.

The curatorial attempt to reference academic similarities is sometimes heavy-handed, but the juxtaposition is of significance, highlighting a core value with wildly different and antithetical results. Aside from formal and conceptual conceits which are present and of interest, when viewing this exhibition there can be no denial of power. For all the curatorial insistence of equality it seems that the psychological response to our fears will always be greater than that of our desires—as Baconian existential horror out-screams Moore’s muted immortal bones.

By Paul Black

Bacon Moore: Flesh and Bone, is on view at Ashmolean Museum, Oxford until 19 January 2014.

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