Sculptor Richard Å tipl shows intricate new works in Prague
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Loading... - Jackson Campbell
- 09 Dec 2021
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“I met Rony Plesl about two years ago and over the span of two years we became friends and realised we had a lot of things in common: our love of art, art history, and development of that, put into practice, and also our relationship to our media, craftsmanship and skill.
“This is kind of where the friendship started and it took off from there. We have a great respect for each other’s work.
“He has a studio in Karlín, which is open to the public and where you can come and see his work, and he installed some of my pieces, which I took as a sign of mutual respect.
“About a year ago I came up with the idea to do a joint show in Prague and he agreed, so it was a year in coming.”
Some of your sculptures on show at the DSC Gallery include human shapes, including heads of various sizes. The heads are so amazing and realistic, or hyper-realistic, looking. How do you make them?
“Well this latest series of sculptures is primarily made of wood, so they’re hand-carved, hand-finished.
“But before I start any of the sculptures I do them in clay, which gives me a great amount of freedom to take it to perfection without having to focus on the hard medium of wood, because with something like that you can’t just start banging away.
“So all the preparation pieces, or preparatory procedures, have to be in place before something like that happens.
“That took a long time to develop. I’ve been sculpting since about 2003 or 2004.
“So it’s a very time-consuming medium, especially with this last show.”
Are the faces based on real people or photographs? Or are they just from your imagination?
“A lot of them are based on me, because I’m a good model – I’ll sit as long as I have to.
“So a lot of the pieces kind of started out as self-portraits.
“Then I started sculpting some of my friends, those close to me, those around me.
“And they kind of start a dialogue between themselves, so there’s a built in narrative that kind of works with the pieces.” Read More…
