Work: Girl with parrot

Description

“The most important place while creating an artwork is your head: it is where ideas are elaborated, thoughts are developed and forms are born”, Aron Demetz.

“Girl with Parrot”, created in 2000 by Aron Demetz, as the title suggests, is a sculpture of a young girl with a parrot 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 infinity. The sculpture was carved from lime wood and then painted in light tones of yellow, ochre and brown.

This life-sized, frontal, minute, and perfectly proportioned girl’s body stands on a pedestal of about 30 centimetres, giving the statue an overall height of 215 centimetres. 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: each long, tapered hand holds the opposite elbow. Her 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 a parrot, perched on the right side of her head, is leaning down to whisper something into her right ear; in fact, its beak is open.

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 material, as ancient as humankind. And humankind is right at the centre of this sculptor’s art; overtime, 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 milling machine to make the surface appear “hairy”.

Further infomration:  Aron Demetz website