Artist Recreates Famous Sculptures With Crystals

By
Ben
-

Artist Daniel Arsham had the brilliant idea to recreate a series of well-recognized sculptures and damaged them with lightly pigmented crystals.

Based in a 200-year-old French studio known for reproducing famous pieces of art, the artist was working on this project for about a year, gathering molds and scans of busts, sculptures and friezes and sculpting. “Making use of classical and ancient objects, this new body of work experiments with the timelessness of certain symbols,” Perrotin explained.

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Michelangelo completed his statue of Moses during the Renaissance in 1515. It has been described as one of the most impressive and significant sculptural works of the past millennium. I have been granted unprecedented access to use a mold taken directly off the work which is currently located at San Pietro in Vincoli in Rome to create a cast using my own technique with Blue Calcite Crystal. Originally Inspired by the intentional dissolution of time between the ancient sculptors and those of the Renaissance, I began to explore the idea of archeology as a fictionalized account of the past, as well as a tool with which to collapse the past and the present. This concept has become a common thread throughout my practice. Making use of classical and ancient objects, this new body of work experiments with the timelessness of certain symbols, furthering my previous investigations into objecthood, archeology, mythology, and our perception of a collective History.

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Each iconic European sculpture is surrounded by various graphite drawings representing the artist’s process in order to “compress time, at once referencing the past, informing the present, and reaching towards a crystallized future.”

If you are curious to see his creations, check out the gallery below, or have a look at his Instagram account where he has attracted more than 615k followers.

Don’t forget to follow the arrows for more amazing images.

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My next exhibition “Paris, 3020” opens at @galerieperrotin in Paris on January 11th 4-8 pm. Everyone is welcome. From the press release: For this exhibition, Daniel Arsham will present a new suite of large-scale sculptures based on iconic busts, friezes and sculptures in the round from classical antiquity. Over the past year, Arsham has been granted unprecedented access to the Réunion des Musées Nationaux – Grand Palais (RMN), a 200-year-old French molding atelier that reproduces masterpieces for several of Europe’s major encyclopedic museums. Arsham was able to use molds and scans of some of the most iconic works from the collections of the Musée du Louvre in Paris, Acropolis Museum in Athens, the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna and the St. Pietro in Vincoli as source material for this new body of work. Interested in the way that objects move through time, the works selected by Arsham are so iconic that they have eclipsed their status as mere art object, and instead have embedded themselves into our collective memory and identity.

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