Kunsthalle Mannheim / Cem Yücetas
)Hector-Bau > Ebene 2 > Schaudepot
Intro
The sirens of ancient mythology were chimera, part woman and part animal, who lived close to the coasts, capsizing entire boats with their alluring song. They were as sensuous as they were dangerous—anyone approaching them, for example Odysseus, faced death.
Henri Laurens’s »Siren« appears to have little in common with this myth. The element of danger has been replaced by an emphasis on the sensual and corporeal. Swelling forms extend into space, round and powerful body parts are set in motion. Everything about Laurens’s figure appears libidinal and liberated, precisely because the artist lets the form itself speak.
In the 1930s Laurens began to explore the motif of the mythical creatures of the sea, and to this day, many of his works from this period are among his major sculptures. The female body—including its metamorphoses—is at the focus of his work, conveying, especially in his sirens, a perfect balance that combines sensuousness and metamorphosis, rest and movement, the static and the dynamic.
Kunsthalle Mannheim
Transkription
Swelling forms extend into space, round and powerful body parts are set into motion. Everything about Laurens’s figure appears libidinal and liberated. Can you feel how the sculpture influences its direct environment, shaping and reviving it?
Henri Laurens, a French sculptor and representative of Cubism, lets the exterior form speak, rather than the content. He worked on the material until he achieved an equilibrium between the concave and the convex: „Before my sculpture becomes a representation of what it is supposed to be, it remains a sculptural happening, or rather a sequence of sculptural events“, as he puts it.
Starting in the 1930ies, Henri Laurens explored those marine creatures of fable lore, the Sirens. Many works created during that time count among his main oeuvre to this day. The female body—including its metamorphosis—is the focal point of his artwork.
In Antiquity, sirens were said to be chimeras, part woman and part animal, living close to the coasts and capsizing entire ships with their alluring song. Sirens were as sensuous as they were dangerous – anyone approaching them in the way Ulysses did would face death. Henri Laurens‘ »Siren« seems to have little in common with that myth. Any danger seems to be gone, and the sensuous, physical aspects are all the more enhanced.
In this sculpture, Laurens achieves perfect balance, as much on a formal as on a content level: the work combines sensuousness and metamorphosis, rest and movement, the static and the dynamic.
