Ikaria - Igor Mitoraj

This artwork combines ancient memory and contemporary treatment. Its proportions are ideal, but Ikaria has been deliberately decapitated and nailed to the ground by a hand that seems to prevent it from taking flight, despite its outstretched wings. Through his artwork, Igor Mitoraj never ceases to express human nature and its imperfection the human body, its beauty and fragility. Often large in size, like Ikaria, in bronze, and six metres high, his sculptures catch the eye in public places now scattered throughout many cities in Europe, the United States and Japan.

A word about the artist

Born in 1944 in Germany to a Polish mother and a French father, Igor Mitoraj graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow where he was a pupil of Tadeusz Kantor. At the beginning of the 1970s, fascinated by pre-Columbian arts, he went to Mexico, where he began sculpting. He returned to Europe in 1974 and exhibited in Paris in 1976 at the La Hune gallery. In 1979, he goes to Carrara in Tuscany where he begins to use marble as his main medium, while continuing to work in terracotta and bronze. In 1983 he set up his studio in Pietrasanta. Igor Mitoraj is considered to be one of Poland's most eminent contemporary artists. At the age of 70, Igor Mitoraj died of leukaemia in 2014.