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Birgitta Ara, Finnish (1935 - 2009) Three Bronze Sculptures - Faith, Hope & Love

Name: Birgitta Ara, Finnish (1935 - 2009) Three Bronze Sculptures - Faith, Hope & Love
Brand: Birgitta Ara
Price: 3677.06 CHF
Availability: InStock
Rating: 4.9 (74 reviews)

About the Item

Birgitta Ara, Finnish (1934 - 2009) three bronze sculptures from 1980, edition number 2/12, each signed 'ara 2/12' (4) Birgitta Majlis Juslin, later Birgitta Ara, born 7 August 1934 in Helsinki. Parents singer and actor Ture Ara and public school teacher Elsie Juslin.  Born in Helsinki in 1934, Ara studied decorative painting at the School of Art and Design from 1952-1955. Later she moved to Paris to model and eventually returned to her art by the 1970's when she exhibited copper sculpture reliefs at the Ecole Nationale Superiere des Arts. She won numerous awards, including the Prix des Jeunes in an exhibition for women's art at the Museum of Modern Art, and a relief was selected for the Salon d'Automne, the art salon in the Grand Palais. She received the Grand Prix de Sculpture at the International Exhibition for women's art in the National Museum of Modern Art in Paris. She eventually returned to Finland in 1991. Provenance: Estate of Countess Margareta Douglas From the Estate of Countess Margareta Douglas, Rivanna Farm, Charlottesville, VA A 10,000 sq ft estate with multiple royal ties, Rivanna Farm was originally built in 1859 and served as a secret rendezvous point for an affair between Prince Pierre of Monaco and Audrey Emery – an heiress and the wife of Russian Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich. It the 1980s, the royal residents continued with Swedish Count Goesta Archibald Douglas and Countess Margareta C.H. Douglas calling Rivanna Farm home. The comfortable and luxurious Charlottesville property was also designed by famed French interior designer Stephane Boudin, who worked on the White House during the John F. Kennedy administration. ARA, Birgitta  (1934– )  Sculptor, mannequin, film actor  Birgitta Ara's life course is one of the more peculiar in Finnish art. After a career as a mannequin and star model of international class, she returned in her forties to the visual arts, which she had devoted herself to in her youth. She has found her main means of expression in the free art of sculpture. In addition, she has executed a long series of accurately characterized portraits, i.a. by President Martti Ahtisaari . Birgitta Ara's father was the singer and actor Ture Ara in his marriage to folk school teacher Elsie Juslin. The parents divorced even before Birgitta had turned two, and she then only met her father when she was fourteen, on her own initiative. At that time, Birgitta dreamed of becoming an actress, but her father did not encourage her; on the other hand, he supported her when, after matriculation, she applied to the Norwegian Academy of Arts and Crafts. In the years 1952–1955, she studied along the lines of decorative arts but found herself lacking the motivation to continue on that path. After a couple of attempts as a model for a clothing company in Helsinki, she was invited to apply to Paris, which she also did as soon as she finished her studies at the Ateneum. With the name Birgitta Juslin in her passport, relatively light luggage and money for a few weeks' stay, she traveled to Paris in the summer of 1955.  Paris was to become the starting point for Birgitta Juslin's continued career for a long time to come. She was lucky enough to immediately enter both the art and fashion worlds and be able to earn a living as a model. Despite rapid success – within a few years she was a highly paid top model – this was not enough for her artistic ambitions. She studied for a time at René Simon's private theater school and also obtained a series of film roles, which gave her a good insight into the not always rosy film world. She made her biggest role in 1960 as Sand in the film Le quatrième sexe , which was also her farewell to the movie star career.  The visual arts had always had a natural place among Birgitta Juslin's interests since her student years, even if during her modeling career she had to settle for a supporting role. In 1957 she exhibited some gouache paintings at a gallery in Paris. Painting was included as a leisure activity between modeling assignments throughout the 1950s and 1960s, and a series of experiments with collages made of dolls gave her a taste for more three-dimensional visual expressions. After an interlude as a hotel hostess in Dover, she began working with hammered metal reliefs. The free art of sculpture was the genre in which she could best realize an imaginatively personal, humorous style, first in marble and then predominantly in bronze.  In the years 1972–1974 she studied sculpture at the École Nationale Superieure des Arts Appliqués et des Métiers d'Arts in Paris. In 1972 she won a prize with a large copper relief at an exhibition in the Musée de l'art moderne de la ville de Paris, and a couple of years later she was awarded the Grand Prix at the annual salon of women artists in the same museum. In the same autumn, she had her first solo exhibition at Galerie Sonnenberg in Paris, where, in addition to copper reliefs, she also showed her first free sculptures in carrara marble. She now considered herself primarily a sculptor and switched to using her father's surname. Her work is henceforth signed Birgitta Ara.  In the late 1970s, Birgitta Ara made a series of trips to the United States. In New York, she was lucky enough to quickly make good contacts, and a collection of her sculptures was shown in several places in the USA, e.g. 1981 at the American-Scandinavian Foundation in New York. In any case, Paris continued to be her fixed point. For a long time she had had to carry out her works in more or less temporary work premises, but in 1977 she was given a purpose-built studio for sculptors in the 15th arrondissement of Paris. Sculptures now began to be added at an increasingly rapid pace, and she participated extensively in exhibitions around the world. In 1978, she exhibited for the first time in Finland, at the Suvi-Pinx summer exhibition in Sysmä. Her first solo exhibition in Finland took place in 1983 in Galleri Bronda in Helsinki.  In addition to several solo exhibitions in Finland, Birgitta Ara has also arranged exhibitions abroad, e.g. in Tehran in 1974 and in Mauritzberg, Sweden in 1996. She has also participated in numerous group exhibitions in various parts of the world, e.g. in Paris, Tehran, Kuwait, New York and Athens. The studio in Paris was her fixed point until 1995, when she definitely moved back to Finland. In the same year, a retrospective exhibition of her art was shown at Galleri Hörhammer in Helsinki. In 2005, Galleri Elverket in Ekenäs exhibited a sculpture collection which for a few years toured to various museums in the USA.  Birgitta Ara's sculptural works are characterized by shapes that associate with human figures or body parts. Her copper reliefs are hammered into a kind of collage-like image compositions, sometimes with cavities behind which other images loom. The sculptures in marble or bronze are executed with an exquisite finish, the bronzes often ingeniously patinated. Overall, they are characterized by a soft caress, sometimes seasoned with a subtle sense of humor. The individual objects often look like compact, almost abstract shapes, from which human forms, feet, faces or other body parts, loom.  Birgitta Ara herself has told how she was fascinated by the expressiveness of people's toes, and she won her first successes with works where the representational theme is feet, often only glimpsed from a strongly closed form that at the same time accentuates the weight of the marble or bronze material. The figurative elements give the otherwise abstract sculptures a charge of hidden stories with the human figure as vocabulary. She has also combined smaller sculptures into interacting group wholes. Dan Sundell has (1995) called her a "modern sculpture's new interpreter of an ideal of form that goes back to the classical conception of proportion and harmony."  Erik Kruskopf

Creator:

Birgitta Ara (Sculptor)

Dimensions:

Height: 5 in (12.7 cm)Width: 13 in (33.02 cm)Depth: 9.5 in (24.13 cm)

Sold As:

Set of 3

Style:

Scandinavian Modern (Of the Period)

Materials and Techniques:

Bronze,Cast,Polished

Place of Origin:

Finland

Period:

1980-1989

Date of Manufacture:

1980

Condition:

Wear consistent with age and use. I have resisted temptation to polish the bronze but I will if requested.

Seller Location:

Hanover, MA

Reference Number:

1stDibs: LU886612208013

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