ART
Eric Fischl |
Written 30 January |
Monday 04 May, 10:00Galerie Daniel Templon, 75003 [map]Eric Fischl
For his new exhibition at the Galerie Daniel Templon, the American artist,
Eric Fischl, presents a series of monumental sculptures entitled Ten Breaths.
Since the start of the 80s, Eric Fishl has been painting the decline of the American Way of Life, its taboos and its contradictions. He moved into sculptural work at the end of the 90s. Searching to better understand the three dimensional element of the human body, he started to produce small clay formats and discovered a great expressive potential. As he explains himself “ an important part of memory finds itself in the hands, in the eyes. That’s why I like sculpture. It’s a matter of recorded memory, of all those things I’ve touched.”
The exhibition presents three groups and a sole figure. The groups are inspired by photographs taken by the artist, notably a troupe of Brazilian dancers. Characteristic of Fischl’s work, the figures express fragility and the perpetual personal inner conflict of the human being that you’d find also in the works of
Rodin or
Giacometti.
Tumbling woman is a homage to the victims of 9/11. It’s a variation of the first exhibited sculpture in 2002 at the Rockefeller Center in New York which was withdrawn after public complaint. Some people had been shocked by the posture of a woman which appeared to recall the fall of the victims from the World Trade Center. For the artist, “if you look at the sculpture in itself, it resembles a dream in which a person floats. There is no weight here representing the force of the body at the time it hit the ground.” When asked about the controversy in an interview, Fischl still felt "confused and hurt by it. It was an absolutely sincere attempt to put feelings into form and to share them, and it was met with such anger and anxiety in a way that used to be reserved for abstract sculpture, really." Fischl felt people were mourning the building more than the people since there were so few bodies but such a high body count, which he felt was wrong.
