John Denning

Reclining Figure with Bird bronze pedestal sculpture

2003

A recurring theme in John Denning’s art (both painting and sculpture) has been combining human figures with birds or horses. The bird in the freestanding bronze sculpture "Philosophe...

Cast bronze sculpture with classic green patina on black marble base. Edition of 3 at this size. Other sizes and patina finishes are also available by commission, please inquire for more details. Pisapia's "Expedition Series," inspired by sea voyages, is about meeting life’s challenges with courage and purpose. It connects to the idea expressed by J.W. Goethe: “Character is formed in the stormy billows of the world.” Taking up life’s tasks can require one to go against the wind. The feeling of determination to achieve and continue steering through obstacles is poured into the pure forms; a dynamic balancing of the straight and curve on different axes. "With a rounded starting point," Pisapia explains, "I add on a variety of disparate angles, diverse curves, and twisting planes. I carve and smooth the surfaces, bringing out particular tensions and transitions." Flavius Valone Pisapia is an Italian-Romanian artist born in Bucharest in 1981. He completed his higher education in the UK, with an MA in Transpersonal Arts & Therapy, 2014; a Diploma in Transformative Arts, 2011; and a BA (Hons) in Film and Video, 2005. Pisapia studied sculpture throughout his higher education and appreciated several sculptor mentors in the UK. Since 2016, he has resided in India, where he is currently an artist in residence at Studio Sukriti in Jaipur. He has had several solo exhibitions in India and his artwork is found in private collections worldwide. "It's important for me to experience the world at a deeper level by penetrating the veil of the senses. Through an immersive process the essence, beauty and the pure form of an idea are gradually revealed to me. The emerging awareness flows into my artwork imbuing it with a higher reality. To achieve this awareness in my creative process, I go through three stages: imagination, inspiration and intuition." - Flavius Pisapia

William King (1925-2015). Reclining figure, ca. 1965. Cast and welded bronze, 7 x 9.5 x 5 inches. Unsigned. William King, a sculptor in a variety of materials whose human figures traced social attitudes through the last half of the 20th century, often poking sly and poignant fun at human follies and foibles, died on March 4 at his home in East Hampton, N.Y. He was 90. His death was confirmed by Scott Chaskey, who is married to Mr. King's stepdaughter, Megan Chaskey. Mr. King worked in clay, wood, bronze, vinyl, burlap and aluminum. He worked both big and small, from busts and toylike figures to large public art pieces depicting familiar human poses -- a seated, cross-legged man reading; a Western couple (he in a cowboy hat, she in a long dress) holding hands; a tall man reaching down to tug along a recalcitrant little boy; a crowd of robotic-looking men walking in lock step. But for all its variation, what unified his work was a wry observer's arched eyebrow, the pointed humor and witty rue of a fatalist. His figurative sculptures, often with long, spidery legs and an outlandishly skewed ratio of torso to appendages, use gestures and posture to suggest attitude and illustrate his own amusement with the unwieldiness of human physical equipment. His subjects included tennis players and gymnasts, dancers and musicians, and he managed to show appreciation of their physical gifts and comic delight at their contortions and costumery. His suit-wearing businessmen often appeared haughty or pompous; his other men could seem timid or perplexed or awkward. Oddly, or perhaps tellingly, he tended to depict women more reverentially, though in his portrayals of couples the fragility and tender comedy inherent in couplehood settled equally on both partners. Mr. King's work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, among other places, and he had dozens of solo gallery shows in New York and elsewhere. But the comic element of his work probably caused his reputation to suffer. Reviews of his exhibitions frequently began with the caveat that even though the work was funny, it was also serious, displaying superior technical skills, imaginative vision and the bolstering weight of a range of influences, from the ancient Etruscans to American folk art to 20th-century artists including Giacometti, Calder. and Elie Nadelman. The critic Hilton Kramer, one of Mr. King's most ardent advocates, wrote in a 1970 essay accompanying a New York gallery exhibit that he was, "among other things, an amusing artist, and nowadays this can, at times, be almost as much a liability as an asset." A "preoccupation with gesture is the focus of King's sculptural imagination," Mr. Kramer wrote. "Everything that one admires in his work - the virtuoso carving, the deft handling of a wide variety of materials, the shrewd observation and resourceful invention - all this is secondary to the concentration on gesture. The physical stance of the human animal as it negotiates the social arena, the unconscious gait that the body assumes in making its way in the social medium, the emotion traced by the course of a limb, a torso, a head, the features of a face, a coiffure or a costume - from a keen observation of these materials King has garnered a large stock of sculptural images notable for their wit, empathy, simplicity and psychological precision." William Dickey King...

Reclining Figure II, by Allan Houser, Apache, abstract, figurative, bronze Allan Houser was born in 1914. His artwork is an ongoing testimony to Native life in America – its beauty...