Igor Mitoraj, CENTURION, 1985

Igor Mitoraj (born Oederan, Germany 26 March 1944, Paris, 06 October 2014) graduated from the art high school in Bielsko-Biala, then studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Cracow, including under Tadeusz Kantor (1967-1968). In 1968, he left Poland. For the next two years he continued his studies at the Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Paris. In the mid-1970s he devoted himself to sculpture, creating scions of intimate heads, torsos, etc. in distinctive wraps or bandages. He showed them in his first solo exhibition in 1976 in Paris, which brought him success with the public and art dealers. The artist divides the later years of his career between Paris and the Carrara area in Italy. He works in classical techniques (stone and bronze sculpture), creating both intimate and monumental sculpture. In his art he refers to the traditions of antiquity, treating its legacy as relics of a golden age of culture and everlasting patterns. The expression of this consciousness is not only the choice of sculpture as the main means of expression (besides it, the artist makes only drawings), but also the reference to the canon of beauty and the pursuit of harmony in the subject matter and elaboration of sculptures, and finally - attention to the workshop and purely technical perfection of works. The artist, who is well-known and respected abroad, was reminded in Poland by the exhibition "We are" in 1990, which was followed by further individual presentations and in group exhibitions, such as "Ars Erotica" in Warsaw and "I like this" in the National Museum in Cracow (1994 and 1996).