Pix Of The Day: Desperately Seeking Igor Mitoraj
CREDITS: see specific details in the main text.
WHERE: various locations worldwide. WHAT: art works by Igor Mitoraj.
Thumbnail clicks pop-up pages from source [1][2][3][5] sites/larger [4] image.

Our search for works by Igor Mitoraj was hampered because we are stolid monoglots: it seems that the Continental Europeans are more ardent admirers of Mitoraj than the English speaking peoples. However, we feel sure that at least one of our visitors will be fluent not only in English, but also in Polish, French, and German.

Just in case Sir Peter Ustinov is not among our regular readers we have given URIs to Google translations where appropriate. The translations are sometimes hard going, not least because of the occasional guffaw-generating turn of phrase, but if we managed then so should you. To preempt accusations of ignorance, or at very least poor research, we should declare our awareness that 'Thsuki-No-Hikari' was acquired in 1995 by the British Museum, and that 'Light of the Moon' was exhibited in the Frederik Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

For the resources we used in this feature, we have to thank:

[1] Geschäftsführer Peter Femfert at Die Galerie, whose domain name is interestingly The-Gallery.de but whose pages we had to have translated by Google. There are four [i][ii][iii][iv] galleries containing works by the artist.

[2] Stefano Contini's gallery for Mitoraj is an Italian site with an English version. There is a short biography and a catalog of works.

[3] Urszula Usakowska-Wolff for her page on the artist, where as they say we got the picture, but the Polish text defeated all the machine translators. We did find one, Poltran, that made a valiant attempt to translate blocks of the text, but eventually the effort wore us down, so we abandoned the job unfinished.

This is a regrettable, because this looks like the page most likely to be able to put us in touch with the artist at a personal level. There is an interesting set of images, selected by a journalist rather than a gallery owner, and now we know what Igor was trying to say in the lead picture! The page title 'Fragmenty harmonii' [Fragments of harmony] should have been fair warning. Urszula has a Mitoraj slide-show feature.

[4] The February 2002 archive pages on the ACS [Associazione Culturale Sinestesie] web site, which also has a picture of the 'Thsuki-No-Hikari'. We offer no translation for this page because its main offering is a link to two large pictures of Mitoraj works. There is a link to a downloadable file in MS-Word format whose Italian language contents we did not investigate.

[5] Jean-Gabriel Mitterrand's JGM Galerie, represented on the Artnet.com web service. The site is in English, and illustrates three more Maraj works in addition to the one we chose, one of them offered by a Canadian gallery.

If you like this stuff, and are lucky enough to be in Warsaw up to 25 April of 2004, the Warsaw Voice has details of a major Mitoraj retrospective containing over 70 sculptures, 25 drawings, and several sculptural projects. The exhibitions are at four sites in the city, and Warsaw Royal Castle has more information.

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