Georges Jeanclos

Le Sacrifice d' Abraham.

La Vierge et  l'enfant.

Arbre 106.

Dormeurs 103.

Outre. La Lune.

Jacob et l' ange 101.

Dormeur 106.

Dormeur 115.

Etude 114.

Dormeurs Couple.

Urne 11.

Urne 110.

Arbre Adam et Eve #2.

Arbre Adam et Eve.

Arrêtez.

Jacob et l'ange 99.

Couple 8.

Dormeur.

Bas Relief.

Barque Saint Julien le Pauvre.

L' Extase.

Urne Porcelain.

Urne avec Couple.

Grand Barque.

Urne.

Georges Jeanclos (1933-1997) is one of France’s great twentieth-century sculptors. His œuvre is rooted in the traumatic events of the Second World War. To escape the round-ups that threatened French Jews, his family was forced to hide in the woods ; Jeanclos, barely ten at the time, had several close brushes with death. When the country was liberated, he saw the corpses of former collaborationists strung up from lampposts ; shortly thereafter, he discovered the skeletal bodies of camp survivors. Decades later, Jeanclos would respond to these seminal events : not by locking himself away in his own experience but by opening up to universality and paying attention to all forms of suffering, past and present ; not by representing horror, but by finding within himself the strength to create beauty.

Jeanclos’ choice medium was clay. He transformed it into thin sheets with which he then shaped human figures. Simultaneously children and adults, men and women, their faces are almost identical. Some are dormeurs resting beneath a coverlet of clay ; others are hidden within urns bearing Hebrew letters drawn from the Kaddish; others are boat travellers bound for the Beyond; still others are kamakuras, meditating bonzes lost in contemplation of the soul’s gardens. To all these, Jeanclos would later add Pietas, amorous Adams and Eves, couples tenderly grazing or stroking one another other. His images reveal both the undeniable weakness of human beings and the invincible strengh of love ; by the simple fact of their existence, they help us to live. (In Ceramics Now)

Images and text via Ceramics Now

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In Wikipedia