It’s amazing to me that someone would use bones as a material for sculpting. The first use I saw of them were animal bones attached to a straight-back chair. It looked awful.
The latest was a face made of small bones that I encountered at an auction this week. It had bulging blue eyes, small bones forming the face and a fat long bone fashioned as a nose. A single antler protruded from the head.
Artist John Paul Azzopardi from Malta has taken bone sculpture to a higher plane, creating a violin, bust, bat and more. He constructs his works by using the bones of small animals.
The bone sculpture at auction was not the only whimsical piece of artwork I saw. The auction house was selling two stone snakes – one a non-functioning bench – attributed to an artist named Miguel Conti, who appears to be Latin American. The snake sculptures were accompanied by a 1981 exhibition card from a New York gallery of works by Conti.
There were also bookends in the form of a reclining “nude” female, the body composed of layers of interlaced wood and sliced in the middle like a magician’s assistant. The auction catalog sheet stated that it was signed Branded R.
They all induced me to stop and take a closer look. What do you think of them?
