ELIXIR
ELIXIR
A collection of works by Canadian born sculptor Blake Ward and German born sculptor Boky Hackel-Ward.
Elixir showcases the fusion between the two artists. Blake and Boky share the body as a material extension, a fragment, mortified on the net in the digital age. We are nothing but a sum of destinies without an identity, in an infinitude of places.
Blake takes Michelangelo’s legacy and runs with it, 3D printing in his bronze sculptures a mystic tension that is deliberately anti-heroic, poignant, paradoxically sensual and immaterial. His bronzes shape unfinished bodies, slender and concise figures, goddesses of memory, ambassadors of imperishable metaphors, ready to take flight at any moment, who seem to be sculpted by light, in which 3D is the material of art. His sculptures are intentionally unfinished, from the Phantom collection to the Spirits collection, the sculptor reworks the vocabulary of ancient statuary, invents new configurations of the nudes of the new millennium, acrobats of precariousness, shipwrecked by globalization. These slender nymphs or Maenads dance on the abyss of the net, invite the viewer to reflect on the contemporaneity, they are relics of humanity, of a trivialized femininity, serialized on Instagram.
Boky Hackel-Ward is a restorer, painter, musician, photographer, performance and conceptual artist, who trained in Florence where she breathed, lived and absorbed the “grammar” of the Renaissance. A polyglot, obsessed with language, she conjugates poetry and figuration resulting in an autonomous, recognizable code.
Her male and female bodies through words welded together determine enigmatic identities. In the communicative energy of language and in the universality of poetry, Boky yearns for the rebirth, the materialization and transfiguration of the verbum, evoking tension towards the absolute expressed with gold.
Blake has exhibited in Monaco, England, Germany, Italy, Singapore, Hong Kong, India, The United States, and Canada. His work is in the private collections of Prince Albert of Monaco, Herb Alpert, Gerry Moss, among others, as well as three public pieces displayed in the gardens of Monaco and one in the Salle Garnier Opera house. Boky has exhibited in Monaco, France, Aspen and Chicago. Their atelier is in Monaco.
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