Wanton Ceramic Figurines - favourite characters in s&m garb

 

These sculptures were exhibited at the Aqua Art Miami this year, and while we missed it on our trip to Miami, we gathered a couple of sentences from the artist’s statement on this work:

‘The contempt for effusive sentimental goods, that pander to nostalgic consumers led me to take these objects and disable them. In this process mass produced figurines become individual and surreal.  These ideas are in conjunction with Duchamp’s ready-mades, Rauschenberg’s erased de Kooning, Paul McCarthy and Jeff Koons.’

Austrian Sculptor Bruno Gironcoli Dead at 73

Sculptor Bruno Gironcoli, whose wide range of eclectic works and techniques defied categorization, has died, the Austria Press Agency reported Saturday. He was 73.

The Greek Slave (1844), Hiram Powers' statue

One of the most popular American statues of the 19th century, Hiram Powers' The Greek Slave (1844), portrays a Greek girl captured by the Turks and put up for sale in a Middle Eastern slave market. The sculptor said of his work: "As there should be a moral in every work of art, I have given to the expression of the Greek slave what trust there could still be in a Divine Providence for a future state of existence, with utter despair for the present, mingled somewhat of scorn for all around her . . . It is not her person but her spirit that stands exposed." Powers made six versions of the statue, differing somewhat in the shape of the slave's chains and other details. Miniature copies of the statue were immensely popular for the rest of the century, "so undressed, yet so refined, in sugar-white alabaster, exposed under little glass covers in such American homes as could bring themselves to think such things right," as Henry James sarcastically put it. more