Work: Girl with parrot

Description

“The most important place where you work on a creation is your head: it is where ideas are elaborated, thoughts are developed and forms are born”, Aron Demetz.

“Ragazza con pappagallo” (Girl with Parrot), created in 2000, by Aron Demetz, as the title suggests, is a sculpture of a young girl with a large bird perched on her head.
She is standing in a posture that suggests she is feeling doubtful and detached. Her gaze is turned away from the viewer towards the infinite. The sculpture was carved from lime wood and then painted in light tones of yellow, ochre and brown.

This life-sized, frontal and perfectly proportioned girl’s body stands on a pedestal of about 30cm, giving the statue an overall height of 215cm. She wears a simple dress, with short sleeves and a round neckline, that follows the lines of her body leaving her forearms and feet bare. The lower part of her dress is worked in long swinging folds, which gives movement not only to the dress, but to the entire sculpture. Her arms are crossed tightly across her stomach with her long tapered hands holding her elbows in a gesture of closure. The face, smooth, polished and light hazelnut in colour, conveys the girl’s youthfulness. It is oval with delicate features, a linear nose and a fine, closed mouth. Long dark brown, slightly layered, hair falls over her shoulders. Her green-brown eyes are wide open below the arches of her eyebrows and they gaze into the distance. Her face is turned slightly to her left, while the bird (actually a cockatoo) is leaning down to whisper something into her right ear; its beak is open in fact.

The surface of the sculpture is pleasant, flowing and smooth to the touch, but some areas, such as behind the elbows, reveal the rough nature of the unpolished lime wood.

This sculpture is from the beginning of Aron Demetz’s expressive period, when the sculptor liked to portray young adolescents who are very realistic yet also enigmatic, absorbed in an aura of silence and their existential doubts. Demetz was born in South Tyrol in 1972. He has reclaimed the woodcarving traditions of his area of origin (Selva di Val Gardena), where he currently lives and works, managing to bring forth an extraordinary topicality from this ancient material. And Man is right at the centre of this sculptor’s art. He has experimented with various techniques and methods of working wood such as controlled combustion, coating with silver, resins, plaster, and even the use of a burr to make the surface appear “hairy”.

Further infomration:  Aron Demetz website