Igor Mitoraj (pronounced Meet-tor-ay) was a Polish artist who lived from 1944 until 2014. Though he started as a painter he is primarily known for his sculptures in bronze and marble.
Mitoraj sculpts in a classical style which basically means his works have ancient Greek and Roman influences. But Mitoraj purposely creates distressed works of art that look like they could have actually been created in ancient times and survived to modern times warts and all.
So you will see in his works missing or partial arms and legs, headless torsos, heads without tops, and weather-stained bronze and marble. His works approximate the damage that we are used to seeing on most ancient Greek and Roman works found in museums such as the armless Venus de Milo. Mitoraj was quoted as saying “I feel that a piece of arm or a leg speak far more strongly than a whole body.”
Then Mitoraj goes a step further beyond Classicism and incorporates some almost surreal, Dali-like, elements that immediately mark the work as his own and are clearly out of touch with the classic style.
Certainly the mask seen in the crotch of the headless winged angel falls far out of the Classical tradition.
The inset heads that are carved into the torsos of his works are another of Mitoraj’s trademarks along with the miniature medusa heads as seen in the crotch above and zoomed in below.
On the day before we drove to the Valley of the Temples in Agrigento, Sicily we looked at images on-line to help us plan our visit for the next day. On-line we saw some stunning images of ancient ruins with huge bronze sculptures that we assumed were just part of the ruins and made us very excited for our tour of the ruins. When we actually came upon the huge bronze statue pictured below of a fallen Icarus covered in weathered greenish blue patina with missing arms below the elbow and legs missing below the knee we were blown away. With the backdrop of the nearly intact Temple of Concordia the fallen Icarus statue made for what I thought at the time was one of the most stunning ancient sites I had ever witnessed.
But we know now that only the backdrop was ancient and the statue was just made to look that way.
On the back of the winged Icarus we found another inset – this one of the snake-haired Medusa.
We forged on through the Valley of the Temples expecting to see some of the other bronze statues we had seen in photos on-line but soon realized that Icarus was the only one there. At the museum in Agrigento we showed one of the docents the on-line pictures and asked where the bronze statues had gone. The docent erroneously told us that the on-line images had been photoshopped and had never existed.
That night with a little internet research we discovered that Igor Mitoraj was the sculptor and that he had done an exhibition of his sculptures using the Valley of the Temples as his backdrop in 2011. The images we had seen on line were not photoshopped, they were from the 2011 exhibition and all but the statue of Icarus had been removed at the end of the exhibition.
So imagine our surprise when a couple of days later we arrived at the even more celebrated ancient archaeological site of Pompeii and were immediately greeted with the sculptures pictured here which we immediately knew were Mitoraj’s work.
For me the magic of Mitoraj and his true genius came out when he began to display his works among the ruins of ancient civilizations. In creating an exhibition using ancient ruins like Pompeii or The Valley of the Temples as his backdrop and with the specific selection and placement of each piece the exhibition becomes a new artistic statement in and of itself.
It had always been Mitoraj’s dream to display his works at Pompeii and after the exhibition at the Valley of the Temples he was invited to display thirty of his works in the sublime setting of Pompeii.
Unfortunately Mitoraj did not live to see his life’s dream come true but he did have time to pick a special spot to place each of his works of art among the ruins of Pompeii.
I chose to display some of these images in black and white because it just seemed to put the subject in its most flattering light.
The exhibition at Pompeii ended last week and we feel so lucky to have been able to see this last statement by the artist. In my mind Pompeii will always contain the iconic sculptures of Igor Mitoraj.
I hope that like the Icarus that remained behind at the Valley of the Temples that the powers that be at Pompeii choose to keep one or two of the sculptures and make it part of the visitor experience.