Virgil Rainer

“Adam and Eve”

1926

Mid century modern original terracotta sculpture by the Hungarian artist, Anna Berkovits of a young woman with her two children. Circa 1955. Signed in the inside of the base. Condition is excellent. Parts of the sculpture have been deliberately not been glazed by the artist. Her work rarely becomes available. Provenance: Sarasota, Florida estate. Anna Berkovits was born in Hungary in 1911 and lived and worked in Budapest. She trained under the art teacher Almos Jaschik in Budapest. Later she was trained in ceramics by the artist Gador Istvan...

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...

Terracotta bust of a young girl, the color mimicking the shadow of bronze sculptures, a feature that established the fame of the Friederich Goldscheider ceramic manufactory in Vienna...

Woman with hands above head, terracotta, 1945, Giorgio Rossi (1894-1981), Tuscan Sculptor. Terracotta sculpture of a nude woman modeled by hand by the artist. Unique piece. Dimensi...