Detail

These two objects on the wall seem to be inviting us to touch them and feel their soft metallic shapes. “Two-part Object of Polyester” is a work made in 1967 by Austrian artist Bruno Gironcoli that has a massive feel to it, with a strong physical presence directed toward the beholders who stand before it. The artist himself wrote: “I try to grasp images of humanity in paraphrase, detours, and in a psychological approach to our environment, as direct depiction and reproduction allow me too little insight.” After training as a goldsmith and studying at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, Gironcoli began to make metal and wire sculptures in which he explored ways to represent the human form. He began making his sculptures with polyester in the first half of the 1960s, as in his early years he did not have the money to work with metal. He had to use cheap and accessible materials, which he coated in uniform metallic covers. Gironcoli’s polyester objects have diverse associations—with nature and the human body and also with organic forms and machines. The artist sees them all as “beings,” or “organisms of fertility.” The work you can see here has simple voluminous forms that make it seem closed and impenetrable, and that prohibit simple interpretation. “I wanted to find beauty in something that existed without much articulation,” Gironcoli said. His works in polyester are an important part of his early work, in which he first began to formulate his own independent formal idioms that were then to characterize his later work.