Igor Mitoraj

Visitors to the Beelden aan Zee museum are all too familiar with his sculptures: the large mask on top of the dune near the museum is his work, and in the collection, we have several sculptures that are regularly displayed or loaned out. In the summer of 2021, the Beelden aan Zee museum presents an extensive overview of the sculptures by the artist Igor Mitoraj (1944-2014).

Igor Mitoraj spent most of his working life in Italy, where he lived for a long time in Pietrasanta, the well-known Tuscan sculptors' village near the marble quarries of Carrara. Inspired by the beauty of classical antiquity but with a contemporary insight into the human condition, Mitoraj created many monumental sculptures in bronze and marble. The sculptures often have a melancholic, calm appearance, in which there is also a sense of decay and decline. His human figures are classically and sensually designed but also fragmented at the same time. The exhibition focuses on the theatrical quality of his work and the often mythological origin of his representations. Wandering through the space with monumental human figures, masks, faces, torsos, feet, and hands, the visitor undergoes an intense experience of classical beauty that also appeals to your own state of mind through the extreme stillness of the work. The faces of his sculptures are sometimes bandaged, as if silenced. In the fragmentation of the sculptures, Mitoraj's modernism is revealed: cutouts in the marble or bronze in which small figures or faces are depicted, sometimes as a prisoner trying to escape, illustrate the postmodern nature of his work and betray the true spirit of the eighties and nineties of the last century. The most beautiful calling card for this exhibition is visible to everyone and is located outdoors, where since the museum's opening in 1994, Mitoraj's monumental mask Light of the Moon prominently crowns a dune top.