Page 121 - La Biennale di Venezia issue of World of Art Magazine

bronze, she polishes it and finally she sands it endlessly until the
sculpture gets the required patina. By this slow process she wants
to obtain a unique sculpture. Sensing she tries to find out what the
bronze wants. When out of this process something like a human
figure appears, that is wonderful. But even those shapes, in those
birds, she wants to put something of beauty in, at the same time
highlighting something of the mystery of the bronze. She doesn’t
try to make a woman, a man, or a bird in bronze, but she wants
to make a bronze awakening a human figure or a bird. She can be
situated in the line Camille Claudel has outlined by being one of
the first in putting the unity between form and contents centrally.
Hélène Jacubowitz gives life and movement to her figures, be it
in an abstract form. Here she makes a link to the sculptors from
the first half of the twentieth century like the Russian Alexander
Archipenko, the Frenchman of Russian origin Ossip Zadkine,
the French Raymond Duchamp-Villon and Hans Arp, the Italian
futurist Umberto Boccioni, the British Henry Moore and Barbara
Hepworth and the Romanian Constantin Brancusi. All these
artists, however different they may be, have tried to reconcile in
a so-called abstracting style the accomplishments of the abstract
and figurative style.
Most of all about the dualism between form and contents in
Hélène Jacubowitz’s oeuvre the professors Marcel van Jole and
Virgil Hammock (Canada) and the critic-painter Michel Gaudet
have written beautiful texts, published in the art book that was
edited about her work . Hélène Jacubowitz has now been working
for about thirty years developing her own style of stereometrically
simplified physical volumes. She makes chiefly female figures
rising in spirals and in which she applies the achievements of the
cubistic repertoire in a contemporary way. In recent years she
conducts the interaction between volume and space clearly into
the direction of expressive, lyric, dynamic, but also - monumental
sculptures.
Hélène Jacubowitz has become an eminent classical-modern
sculptress in bronze. She created tall, abstract-figurative figures,
extremely subtly modelled. Her mainly female figures radiate
a quiet grace and sensitivity bringing life to the bronze. Hélène
Jacubowitz’s oeuvre is as if it was an antidote against the ongoing
mechanization of the human existence. In addition she has Holland, Luxemburg, France, Italy, Sweden, Israel and the United
developed her own sculptural language of forms. Her studio is not States... About twenty of her works are in public ownership in
an ivory tower, screened off from the industrial, urban and exciting Belgium, Holland, France, Denmark, Poland and Israel. She was
modern world, but it is a place where one reflects on the artist’s awarded prizes in Belgium, France, England and Sweden.
role in this topicality. Hence the monumental projects. I conclude. For tree decades already Hélène Jacubowitz
That the whole process of sculpting in bronze takes time means strives unwearyingly and painstakingly for an always purer and
that you can fathom into the depth and that you can avoid more perfect unity of forms in an immaculate finish. With her
superficiality. Hélène Jacubowitz succeeds in it. She knows to use biomorphic sculptures she advances a vitalist movement against
her technical abilities to penetrate into the human psyche through the excessive stress of the consciousness and the ratio. And
her sculptures. The recognition of her talent is consequently isn’t this a beautiful humanistic message at the beginning of the
growing and as far as I am concerned rightfully so. She exhibited twenty-first century.
individually and in group in interesting galleries all over Belgium, Ernest Van Buynder, Honorary Chairman MuHKA

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