Emmanuel Villanis

“Diana”

Circa 1885

Original hand cast bronze dual figure of a hollow dressed torso of a male and female representing Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. The bronze sculpture is attributed to the American sculptor Judith Shea. This piece is a maquette for a life size bronze executed by this artist that is located in an outdoor space in Buffalo, New York. Both are titled “Eden” and were done in 1987. Condition is excellent. Unsigned. Label on the bottom of the thick pine base states the artist and title of the artwork. Provenance: A Long Island, New York collector. Judith Shea has been a notable presence in the New York art world since the 1970s. Trained as a designer at Parsons, she soon found the fashion industry too restrictive and abandoned it in favor of making art. For her first solo show, at The Clocktower in 1976, Shea made a work based on color theory, using transparent silks in a spectrum of colors, worn by a live model. Other early work referenced clothing and its construction, first as flat, minimalist pattern and later as molded draping over implied, absent figures. In the 1981 Whitney Biennial, Shea showed three simple forms that evoked iconic clothes of the 1950s and 60s—the overcoat and the simple sheath dress—which hung from the wall as if on hangers. Five related works were included in the Hirshhorn’s Directions 83 survey. All of these works evoke human presence, felt as absence, as if the clothes were placeholders for missing persons. Thinking about her earlier clothes-based works, Shea has said that she “was looking for characters, for personae, really, to occupy them. I used clothes as stand-ins for people.” With the support of NEA grants, Shea began to learn bronze casting, and she was able to also spend time in Paris studying the statuary of its parks and gardens. This research led to several hollow-figure compositions from the 1980s that were designed to be sited in public spaces, such as Eden (John Hancock Tower, Chicago), Shepherd’s Muse (Oliver Ranch), Shield (Sheldon Museum of Art), and Without Words (Walker Art Center). In the 1990s, after a residency at Chesterwood—the site of Daniel Chester French’s studio in Stockbridge—Shea began to use woodcarving to make monumental public sculpture. The first of these full-scale wooden figures were shown in 1992 at the Whitney Museum at Phillip Morris in New York. In 1994 her wooden equestrian statue The Other Monument, a monumental image of a black man on a black horse, was installed at Doris Freedman Plaza in New York, in the same plaza as the William Tecumseh Sherman...

Here for your consideration is a beautiful highly detailed bronze done in the forth quarter of the nineteen century after the work of Jean Boulogne, known as Giambologna. Boulogne’s sculpture was done in marble and was completed between 1579 and 1583. The sculptor of this bronze is Antonin Mercie, a well known French sculptor born in 1845. The bronze represents the Rape of the Sabine Women (Latin: Sabinae raptae), also known as the Abduction of the Sabine Women or the Kidnapping of the Sabine Women, was an incident in Roman mythology in which the men of Rome committed a mass abduction of young women from the other cities in the region. It has been a frequent subject of artists and sculptors, particularly during the Renaissance and post-Renaissance eras. Signed on base “Mercie” for Antonin Mercie.. In very good condition wirh original brown patina. The base which depicts rocks is bronze and has been painted a matt black. Provenance:: A Sarasota estate. Mercié, (Marius Jean Antonin Mercie...

Beautiful original bronze sculpture of a female nude dancer in the Art Deco period. Circa 1930. The artist is the well known American sculptor, Allan Clark. Signed in the base by th...

Circa 1910 bronze cast medal by the French sculptor, Pierre Charles Lenoir. Edge mark, cornucopia. Pierre Lenoir was a French sculptor and medallist and was one of the Breton sculp...

Bathing woman drying her right foot also known as "Suzanne" by Aimé-Jules DALOU (1838-1902) A bronze sculpture with a nuanced dark brown patina Signed on the base " Dalou " A very...

Patrick BRUN was born in Paris in 1941. After obtaining his Engineering degree, he began his professional life as a teacher in mathematics and physics. After this period, he started ...

Patrick BRUN was born in Paris in 1941. After obtaining his Engineering degree, he began his professional life as a teacher in mathematics and physics. After this period, he started ...

Kevin Christison was born in 1968 in Silver Spring, Maryland and was raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. He began his college career as a football player, majoring in art history at the University of Oregon. It is there that he met a sculptor who kindled his interest in studio art, prompting him to take a year off from football and try his hand at sculpture. From the University of Oregon, Christison went on to the California College of Arts in Oakland, CA where he graduated with a BFA in Fine Art in 1991. During his time at school and shortly after, he worked as an assistant to several esteemed sculptors such as Dan Dykes...