Page 120 - La Biennale di Venezia issue of World of Art Magazine

contemporary artists in la Biennale di Venezia issue LES TOURNANTS DE LA VIE, BRONZE SCULPTURE 60 H X 120 W X 60 D CM. PEDESTAL 80 H CM.
Exhibition Venue: Venice, Palazzo Bembo, 2nd floor room 14A

SWAN LAKE, BRONZE SCULPTURE 150 H CM. PEDESTAL 50 H X 50 W X 50 D CM.

HÉLÈNE JACUBOWITZ
Lives and works in Tel Aviv, Israel
www.helenejacubowitz.com

Hélène Jacubowitz is born in Antwerp. Belgium She started as a
sculptress about thirty years ago, after she had followed lessons
plastic expression in the “Atelier” of the Antwerp Academy by the
Chilean artist and teacher, Ruperto Urzua. Hélène mostly creates
in bronze, that ancient dark or gold-brown alloy of copper and
tin, often with the addition of a little zinc. By now she knows
the metier as no other. Her works are made with the lost-wax
technique.
Almost all her works in bronze are as if they were shaped by
light and evoke, at least as far as I am concerned, the irresistible
inclination to touch them. Hélène Jacubowitz has developed a
sculptural form that enables her to pass on not only a feeling
of space but also of movement. Follow the lines, the form, the
movement, the equilibrium. As a unity of movement as a complex
of elegance it is very successful. Her sculptures are like sensitive
poems, of which you cannot change one letter.
It is not simple to situate the oeuvre of a modern artist like
Hélène Jacubowitz because statements like this often degenerate
easily into apparent profundity or sheer nonsense. If her work
must anyhow be explained, I think I may put it that she as an
artist wants to create herself. The stress falls both on “creating”
and on “objects”. She wants to have the feeling that she has
made something that did not exist yet. Not just an imitation of a
figure or of an animal, how skilful it may be, not just something
decorative, how smartly it may have been invented, but something
with a deeper meaning and a lasting value, something of which
she has the feeling, it is something more than the poor objects
of our earthly existence. Hence, the poetic titles she gives to
her works revealing also her positive view on the world: “Lady
Céleste”, “Promise”, “Beauty revealed” and I could continue this
enumeration for ever.
She animates bronze. I believe that this intense feeling for the
uniqueness of an object made by the magic of human hands is
that what the sculptress Hélène Jacubowitz wants to evoke for us.
She starts by not looking at her model. She starts by mounting a
skeleton, then she moulds the clay, she has the sculpture cast in

120 WORLD of ART