Wendy Klemperer

Running Horse

2012

AP 2 Ernest Trova was an artist whose signature creation, a gleaming humanoid known as “Falling Man,” appeared in a series of sculptures and paintings and became a symbol of an imperfect humanity hurtling into the future. Mr. Trova was largely known as a sculptor, but his “Falling Man,” a standard of Pop Art, began life as a painted figure, taking shape on his easel in the early 1960s. Faceless, armless, with a hint of a belly and, its name notwithstanding, of indeterminate sex, the figure struck a variety of poses, sometimes juxtaposed with other like figures, sometimes with mechanical appendages. In October 1963 his one-man show, “Falling Man Paintings,” was the inaugural exhibition of the Pace Gallery on West 57th Street in Manhattan; it sold out, with the works purchased by the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, the architect Philip Johnson and others. In three dimensions, the “Falling Man” figure was made from different materials over the years — nickel and chrome-plated bronze, enamel on aluminum, stainless steel — and often, like the Oscar statuette, was polished to an industrial sheen. It was clearly a space age creation, a forerunner of C3PO, the golden robot in “Star Wars.” “He found the space age both inspiring and dehumanizing,” Arne Glimcher, who founded the Pace Gallery, now PaceWildenstein, said in an interview on Friday. By the end of the 1960s, “Falling Man” had become Mr. Trova’s trademark, provoking Hilton Kramer, the art critic of The New York Times, to write that Mr. Trova had subjected his favorite figure “to almost as many variations as the Kama Sutra describes for the act of love.” Ernest Tino Trova Jr. was born in St. Louis on Feb. 19, 1927. Shortly after his high school graduation his father, an industrial tool designer and inventor, died, and young Ernie, as he was known, went to work, most significantly as a window dresser for a department store. His early paintings were in the Abstract Expressionist mode, but his attentiveness to the mannequins had an influence on his art. Through the 1970s and 1980s he continued with “Falling Man,” though he also became interested in formalized, almost mechanical-seeming landscapes, and the figures began to appear, reduced in size, within the context of abstractly rendered gardens. A self-taught artist with an impish wit and an eccentric turn of mind, Mr. Trova craved the recognition that was available to artists only in New York City, but he never visited for more than a week at a time and made almost no friends among New York artists. He did befriend Ezra Pound. As a fevered fan of Julio Iglesias...

"My search in the visual arts is for the hidden Human spirit. That small part that makes us each unique, yet finds us a common home. I have been a paid professional as well as an active volunteer in state run mental institutions, private and county run nursing homes and been a drug rehabilitation counselor. Overriding this vein is the love of movement and dance and the shear...

Wall sculpture “It has long been known that the Earth is round, but it is only now in the space age that it is really seen to be so. The stunning pictures of the blue planet floatin...

Passadís Here some fragments for one of his latest exhibition catalogue “I think that a work of art should puzzle viewers, make them reflect on the meaning of life” Antoni Tàpies Moisés Gil’s sculptures can be described as philosophical and conceptual, as they encourage individuals to reflect and act in a never-ending existential struggle, in the face of the multiple situations by which they are affected in contemporary societies. Art is always a form of communication: communication with and between the materials employed by the artist, giving rise to an aesthetic visual balance able to convey feelings, emotions and ideas, all of which are essential to a nonconformist commitment and worldview. Moisés Gil puts his representations of individuals in sculptural structures to better indicate the place of humans in the world, the place of contemporary individuals in their different environments, sometimes hostile; they are naked men...