Blake Ward and Boky Hackel-Ward: Sentient Symmetry
The sculptures are a transgression of the classical rules, crossing over into the abstract and ethereal realms of our inner worlds.
The sculptures are a transgression of the classical rules, crossing over into the abstract and ethereal realms of our inner worlds.
Petley Jones Gallery is thrilled to present the works of Blake Ward and Boky Hackel-Ward.
In this work, traditional ”hand made or “analogue” sculptural methods have been combined with modern digital techniques of sculpting using a 3D sculpting program.
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.
Blake Ward’s works from his Spirits Collection expand on the techniques of figurative sculpture developed in antiquity.
This exhibit is focused on music-themed art in all its forms and celebrates music and its harmonious and historic relationship with visual art.
Building on the techniques of figurative sculpture developed in antiquity, this collection of contemporary sculpture challenges the classical figure by shifting our attention toward the exploration of negative space thus leading us inward.
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