Naissance - Drawings for sculpture
10-22 September 2011 Opening Saturday 10 September 3-5 pm
“Drawing is the beginning of everything - the beginning of ideas.”
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Past, Present, Future 2004 sandstone 25 x 400 x 25 cm Apocalyptic paradigm shift 2008 acrylic on canvas 92 x 771 cm |
It is arguable that the sculpted female form is the most powerful symbol to have been created by Man. The image of Woman historically and today, embodies notions of fecundity, fertility, birth, power and temptation. The ancient Venus Figurines Venus of Lespugue (Musée de l'Homme, Paris); Slovakia’s Venus of Hradok and the important Venus of Willendorf have for millennia given hope, inspired, fascinated and intrigued. In contemporary times in Australia artists such as Bertram Mackennal (1863-1931) Guy Boyd (1923-1988), Lyndon Dadswell (1908-1986) and Tom Bass (1916-2010) have found inspiration in the feminine. But where did that form begin? What are these totems borne out of? They are borne out of drawing.
Born in Cabramatta, the son of Italian migrants, Vince Vozzo is among the most important contemporary Australian figurative sculptors. Vozzo insists that, “Drawing is the beginning of everything - the beginning of ideas” and it is from the tumbling figures in drawings such as his Apocalyptic paradigm shift 2008, that his marble and stone Venus’s are born. Selected by Italian curator Vittorio Sgarbi for the Venice Biennale 2011 Apocalyptic paradigm shift is a Bosch inspired complex panorama of bats, angels, Greek gods, mules, serpents, and levitating houses – a womb, cradling the geneses of future objects. Henry Moore said that drawing was an outlet for his ideas and within Vozzo’s drawings the viewer is constantly aware of thousands of these ideas waiting to be extracted from the block.
In stone we witness the genius of Vozzo’s method. It is in the innate “life” retained in the transfer from two to three dimensions that Vozzo is commanding and in the truthful manipulation of the stone. Small works like the Carrara marble Woman waiting I have the power and feminine authority of Venus of Willendorf. His Sydney sandstone, Woman waiting I has the proportions and fluid rhythm of Brancusi’s Bird in Space in the New National Gallery in Berlin. Vozzo creates the illusion that the object is soft, supple, light and malleable, but remains true to the stone, allowing the natural density and weight of the object to suggest the form. “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” wrote John Keats and like his Grecian Urn, the beauty of Vozzo’s amphora-like figures are all we need to know.
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