Aleksandras Aleksejevas: Bronze Relief Icons
3 – 24 December, 2009. “Sacred Space” gallery presents a solo exhibition by the Lithuanian artist Aleksandras Aleksejevas. Using bronze relief, a technique that he has studied in depth, and that was common in mediaeval and renaissance religious and secular art, but that has since fallen into comparative disuse, Aleksejevas demonstrates a profound mastery of his medium, to produce works that are surprisingly innovative, while still remaining true to the traditional iconographic canon.
St Anthony the Great Bronze
Beheading of St John the Baptist Bronze
Following the theory that has animated much of his earlier work, and especially that dealing with religious and archaic pagan themes, Aleksejevas reduces his forms to their essentials in order better to express their inherent power. In this he reflects exactly one of the pre-eminent tenets of orthodox iconography. The use of relief for his icons is, however, unsusual, and recalls a very rare and special category of Byzantine sculpture that was mainly confined to Macedonia in the 9th to 13th Centuries, and which brings a third, “fleshly” dimension to the works which is absent in the flat topography of most orthodox image-making. As Professor Pentcheva of Stanford University’s Art History department comments in her article The Performative Icon:
“… with the relief icon, matter fills an empty shell and gives materiality or substance to what is no longer there, to what is beyond the tangible: a present absence…relief icons display divine appearance through textured matter.”
From an article by Jonathan Wiggin March 2007
Opening Reception: Opening reception 3 December 6.30 - 8.30 pm, all welcome
Sacred Space Gallery, St John’s Notting Hill, Lansdowne Crescent, London W11 2NN
Tel: 0208 969 7492 Mobile: 07903889897 E-mail: info@sacredspacegallery.com
Open Monday to Friday 10 am to 1 pm or by appointment
