Igor Mitoraj German, 1944-2014

Igor Mitoraj (Oderan, Germany 1944 - Paris, France 2014)

Born in 1944, in Oederan, Germany, to Polish parents. At the end of the war, he returned to Poland with his family, where he attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków, studying painting with the painter and theatre director Tadeusz Kantor.

He then travelled to Paris, where he completed his education, and to Mexico, where he was drawn by the ancient American cultures and the imposing pyramids of the Mayan and Aztec civilisations.

After spending long periods in New York and Greece, at the end of the seventies he settled in Pietrasanta, a Tuscan town at the foot of the Apuan Alps, which had long been a point of reference for sculptors due to the famous marble quarries.

Here, in 1983, Mitoraj opened a studio, where he designed his famous fragmented statues: busts, heads, columns, bas-reliefs, mythical characters, heroes and deities.

Mitoraj was most inspired by the classical tradition. In his artworks, the artist tries, through fragments, to represent the passage of time on the sculptures, to mimic what time has done to the real artworks of antiquity.

The exhibitions in the United States, in particular at the Academy of Art in New York, in 1989, marked the artist's international success.

Mitoraj died in 2014, in Paris. Following his express wish, he was buried in Pietrasanta.

Copyright the artist. Photo UniCredit Group (Sebastiano Pellion di Persano)