Igor Mitoraj (1944-2014) Centurion Ii

Igor Mitoraj (1944-2014) “Centurion II” HC 282/1500. In a very rare blue patina

height - 18 cm

One of the most notable contemporary sculptors, Igor Mitoraj, was one of the leading Polish artists who gained international fame. The beginnings of Mitoraj's great career are associated with his move to Italy in 1979. In the small town of Pietrasanta located at the foot of the Apuan Alps, the artist found everything he needed to work. The proximity of the Carrara quarries and Monte Altissimo had already made Pietrasanta, nicknamed “Little Athens”, the home of sculptors such as Marino Marini and Henry Moore. In the mid-1980s, a famous Italian art critic and one of the most influential women in Rome, Maria Angiolillo, visited there. Fascinated by the Polish artist, she participated in the organization of Igor Mitoraj's first major exhibition, which took place at the Castel Sant'Angelo in 1985. The curators were famous Italian critics and art historians: Vittorio Sgarbi and Maurizio Calvesi. This exhibition opened the door to Mitoraj's international career and led to other important exhibitions in France, Italy, Spain, Germany, Switzerland and the United States. He created a number of monumental sculptures in Italy and France, including: the caryatids of the Prefecture of Police in Paris, the Milan Fountain and the monument in Piazza Mignanelli in Rome. Mitoraj's sculpture embodies the ideal of classical beauty while evoking - through its incompleteness - the feeling of the destructive effects of time. Weakened grace, damaged elegance, diminished grandeur, fragment instead of a whole - these are aesthetic values in themselves that find recognition in the art of postmodernism, which is distinguished by a constant dialogue between contemporaneity and tradition. The artist himself did not like his sculptures to be accompanied by the adjectives mutilated, defective and defective. The artist said: “I don’t like sculpture where when you look at it you see everything at once; you have to figure it out yourself and get to the bottom of it for a long time. I think art should intrigue the viewer. To be a mystery. He might even keep his secret forever. For Mitoraj, fragmentation is not the same as disability. However, it is supposed to be a symbol of harmony that disappeared with the end of ancient civilizations, and the beauty of the sculpture takes on a human and earthly dimension, unlike classical sculpture which was the reflection of the ideal, divinity and of the absolute. . Mitoraj models his sculptures damaged, divided, destroyed, he models each fragment - arm, leg, eye, mouth, genitals, wings, torso - but this fragmentation reflects the condition of man and society: this "divided self" , split personality, violence of man towards others and towards himself, deep conflicts of consciousness with the subconscious, worrying self-destructive tendencies to which the individual is subjected in today's world. Mitoraj proves that beauty will survive any injury, mutilation, any possible destruction, just like beauty. the beauty of the petals of a cut flower survives. - Costanzo Costantini cited in: Costanzo Costantini, Conversazioni with Igor Mitoraj, L'enigma della pietra, ed. Il Cigno, Rome 2004.