Marbled Facts
Two famous quotes by Michelangelo Buonarroti on sculpture are "The figure was already in the raw stone. I just had to beat away everything superfluous" or "I saw the angel in the marble and chiseled until I released him.“
Half a millennium later, these quotes could just as well come from the mouth of Melanie Sterba (1994, Zurich). The stone sculptor Melanie Sterba was known early on as an exceptional talent. Already at the age of 14 she started the sculpture school, which she then completed four years later cum laude. Since then, the artist has won several prizes at home and abroad.
I am extremely pleased to make her work known to the wider public for the first time and to set up her first exhibition "marbled facts".
Melanie Sterba creates unique monumental sculptures made of granite and Carrara marble in her own world. The artist refers to a centuries-old handicraft and transports it to the present day, to the here and now.
In an old blacksmith's shop from 1840 in Oberwil near Nürensdorf, the artist works completely self-sufficient on huge blocks with hammer and chisel and shapes the stones into unique objects and breathtaking (monumental) sculptures.
Melanie Sterba herself is already an apparition. In a tailor-made stonemason leather chasm, which could also come from the latest fashion glossy magazine, she sculpts stones weighing tons in front of her forge, which, like the artist herself, has moved from another time to the present. Many a passersby or motorist rub their eyes in amazement from this spectacle.
A block of Carrara marble coated in black, stands on the oak workbench. The gently glittering white of the marble shows a picture that gives every viewer a very personal emotion. Love, fear, understanding, security and insecurity, courage, confidence, hope and hopelessness, grief, but also reconciliation and honesty, are just some of the strong emotions that permeate the viewer of the sculptures.
In her works, Melanie Sterba combines sculptural beauty with intense emotions and elicits his sculptures from the marble stone in an unprecedented way, whose pictorial semantics still make us humans think today - or especially today.
For further information and images, please contact info@nicolavonsenger.com.
Visit Marble Work to see work descriptions and pictures.
Pictures at the exhibition
