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Intro
Although the title of the work awakens associations with the expansive movement of a dancer, Giacomo Manzù captures something else in this sculpture. His interest is focused on the instant between concentrated rest and the onset of movement, the clear structure of the figure, and the dancer’s precise contours. Shown standing on tiptoes, the figure brings a further element into play: Manzù, a self-taught sculptor and one of the greatest Italian sculptors of the 20th century, plays with the body’s mass, lending it an apparent weightlessness.
In his series of »Dancers«, which he began in the 1950s and which brings to mind a similar series of works by Edgar Degas (1834–1917), he lends the tense, controlled bodies a tangible vitality and expressive power. Like his contemporaries Alberto Giacometti (1901–1966) and Marino Marini (1901–1980), Manzù remained faithful to the figurative throughout his life. His depictions of dancers, as well as his long series of cardinals (begun in 1934), bear witness to an untarnished, humanist vision of man.
Kunsthalle Mannheim