Lot 68: Untitled

Jorge Michel (Argentinian 1925-1991)
Untitled
Mora wood
107 x 21 x 20 in. (271 x 53 x 51 cm.)
Executed 1975.

Acquired from the artist.
CDS Gallery, New York.

Jorge Michel was born in Argentina in 1925. A self-taught sculptor, he had worked as a sailor on merchant ships repairing furnaces, where he learned how to work with metals and mechanics. A published poet and an avid reader, Michel also worked in advertising earlier in his life, making movies that garnered awards in Europe and Latin America. As a visual artist he worked intensively during the latter part of his life, yet exhibited only occasionally, in Munich (1973), Buenos Aires (1986), and New York (1989).

The artist's extraordinarily focused labor very slowly shaped his pieces over long periods of time. With self-designed tools, axes, and gouges, he chiseled, sanded, and waxed centuries-old wood or exceedingly large and hard masses of stone. Through exacting discipline, Michel evolved his precise craftsmanship and unique sculptural language. Although he worked in iron, stone, marble, and granite, and occasionally also bronze, wrought iron and stainless steel, he was known for his works created with the wood of fallen trees, some as old as six-hundred years and many native to Argentina, including mora and tibebuia-ipe. He remained in Argentina, in part, because of the materials he was able to obtain there.

His works include both abstract organic compositions as well as more utilitarian objects. Michel's sinuous and evocative forms are rooted in biomorphic surrealism. Although often created from a single block of stone or one slab of wood, through his detailed and time-consuming attention, in the end they appeared to be miraculous, monumental forms shaped by the wind or waves. At once modern and archaic, the rounded whorls and protruding knots bear a relationship to aspects of twentieth-century sculpture, including the works of Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, and Jean Arp. Michel also created scattered groupings that maintained harmonious relationship in space. Such pieces might include Encounter, 1975, a three-part ensemble of 600-year old mora wood; Cúmulo, 1976, an eight-part marble work that could be rearranged; or even Vigías, ca.1989, a large-scale public work chiseled from several 500-kilo chunks of granite, each of which appears to float just above the park's lawn. Other works are more hybrid forms of art and design: curvaceous benches, seats and desks that invite the touch. Michel's furniture retains his sensibility while offering a more functional and human-scale interaction. This high throne, fashioned from a single tree trunk, is at once humbling and aggrandizing. Pointing like a finger to the sky, it retains the proud thrust of a tree while offering a slippery pocket for a human to nestle within. Jorge Michel's sculptures convey ancient truths through a timeless language of tangible forms.

Combining a humanistic vision with a belief in the voice of nature, Jorge Michel had both the singular will to be an artist of unique vision and the sensitivity of a world citizen. Although he died 1991 at the early age of 67, he is respected as a sculptor's sculptor. As he once stated, "Let me run ahead of the road."

Deborah Cullen, Director of Curatorial Programs, El Museo del Barrio, New York.