an eye blinks turquoise
from the fisherman’s drag net
the dancing satyr
I went to the Bronze exhibition at the Royal Academy. I’ve been to a lot of the big hitting exhibitions this year and Bronze is right up there. There were so many pieces covering 6000 years of history, unsettling old pagan pieces, pre-classical from northern Europe, of unknown function, all the way to the modern day where Bourgeois (one of her wonderful spiders seemingly skids across a wall), Moore and Matisse amongst others, were represented. The exhibition paid respect to both Asian and African artefacts too, the Nigerian pieces were astonishingly beautiful.
Perseus and Medusa (a copy of Cellini’s original) was also imposing, him holding aloft her serpent head, with serpents seemingly also spilling from her headless neck as he stands triumphant over her fallen corpse.
But my favourite piece, was the first piece, which get’s a room of its own as you enter the exhibition. The Dancing Satyr, a Greek classical piece pulled from a fisherman’s net off the coast of Sicily, fairly recently (1998). He’s incomplete, the leg he balanced on, both arms, part of the head and his tail are all missing, but this does not diminish him. The powerful realism really struck me, the definition of the muscles in movement of something beyond human, the detail in the face and hair. It was quite astonishing really.
It’s a great exhibition. Well worth going to!
Photo from the Royal Academy Website
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