(born Oederan in 1944 – Polish ancestry, lives and works in France and Italy) Visita a Piero, 1990, patinated bronze, signed Mitoraj, one from an edition of 3, 113 x 70 x 35 cm, (PP)

Provenance: Galerie JGM, Paris
Private Collection, Italy

Exhibition: Paris, Galerie JGM, Mitoraj - Têtes 1980 – 1990, April - May 1991, exhibition catalogue- cat. with ill. on the book cover and on an inside page (unpaginated catalogue)

Again and again a head, at once bleak, timeless, melancholy, ruined, fated. Again and again a face turned inward, a mask of interiority, its eyes, open or closed, introspective, always without anguish, an uncanny mix of quietude ans stillness, in the words D. W. Winnicott used to describe the sacred core of the self. We are in the presence of a secret, the pure silence of being. Two things come to mind: the head is a fragment and a depth-a fragment and a depth in dialectical relationship. Theodor Adorno’s thought, that “art of the highest calibre pushes beyond totality towards a state of fragmentation,” and, Samuel Beckett’s thought, that “the only possible spiritualty development is in the sense of depth,” converge in Mitoraj’s head. They are enigmatic fragments of spirit, found in a burial ground of ancient consciousness. Archaeological in import, collective archetypes, but also uncanny persons. Greco-Roman, with an Egyptian touch? Suffice it to say these heads signal the emergence of self-conscious humanness-and also its demise, as their hurt condition suggests. When, as Foucault suggests, man will become a hollow concept, washed away like a sign in the sand, these ahistorical heads will remain, as trophies reminding us of what once was, and what might yet again be. This is some of Mitoraj’s strongest, most intense work. (Donald Kuspit)