Anne Sophie Morelle

Anne-Sophie Morelle’s sculptures are human in scale. Whether it is a boy, a girl, a young couple, or an old woman, the atmosphere these sculptures project is classical, though their conception is wholly contemporary. This back and forth reading between the archaic and the contemporary builds a tension in these recent sculptures. As inventive scenarios, they are tinged with a symbolism worthy of the Belgian sculptor George Minne (1866-1941). Minne’s well-known Fountain of the Kneeling Youths has something of Anne-Sophie Morelle’s youthful introspection, a sensitivity to the social side of life that likewise inspired Auguste Rodin and Camille Claudel.

               There is a textural immediacy and abstract gestural spirit in Anne-Sophie Morelle’s surface treatment. These recent sculptures, created using the lost wax technique, can have a formal presentational character, but Morelle adds her own creative contextualization to the way she places the bodily form, situates it in space, and situates her sculptures presentationally. Morelle’s sculptures capture the figure with an imaginative ambiguity that borders on androgeny. We can see this in Grace (2003). The undulating surface texture and detail captures light to great effect. Intangible and ambiguous surfaces that look worn by time offer us clues, tell us these are indeed 21 st century sculptures. Le défi (2001) again begins as an archaic study, but then lets the surfaces wear, the textures and material effects take over.