Anna Chromy is an artist who changed from surrealist oil paintings to sculpture in 1993 and is also the creator of monumental public sculptures, mainly in bronze and marble, that have been installed in a number of prominent sites in Europe and China. Although the majority of her works could be seen as hyper real in the delineation of the human body, and are inspirations from themes linked to ancient Greek and Roman mythology including the fables of Orpheus and Sisyphus, Chromy cites one of her main influences as surrealism. These influences are reflected in a number of art pieces that combine human figures with veiled faces, missing limbs together with wheels detached from vehicles. Chromy has turned to marble as the substance for her newest and largest sized public sculpture, the Cloak of Conscience, which raises numerous issues about traditional and modern sculpture.
<i>Now, at last, Phineus regrets the unjust fight, but what can he do? He sees the figures in diverse attitudes, and recognises the men, and calling on each by name, asks his help. Disbelieving, he touches the bodies nearest to him. They are marble.</i>
Ovid, Metamorphosis, Book V
The massive dimensions of Chromy’s Cloak of Conscience, and the pure whiteness of the Carrara marble, with its origin at the quarry of Michelangelo, surely recaptures what some writers have referred to as an ‘excess’ in reference, for instance, to the art of Bernini: skin and cloth rendered as rock – the exact opposite of its natural material properties. This has also been referred to as the ‘art of petrifaction’, recalling Ovid’s account of how the liveliness and ‘diverse attitudes’ of some marble sculptures are such that they might be incorrectly recognized as legitimate people, even in a scenario of war, which is a reverse process in handling the standard ambiguity of sculpture.
The avowed aim of sculptors like Michelangelo and Bernini was to reach the possibility of marble looking as both solid and translucent concurrently and indicate a plasticity and weightlessness that is significantly opposed to its material quality. However Chromy references this tradition using an inversion of the illusion of marble as flesh and cloth. First of all there is not a visible analogue of the human form from which we can engage in the impression of soft tissue, which more often than not demands at least partial nudity. Instead the work is made up from the folds of fabric and the omitted volume of a body, which indicates weight – so much weight in fact that we can call this a building (or an ‘archi-sculpture’ to use Chromy’s term) even a ‘chapel’, and therefore it maybe has more in common with the use of marble in architecture than in art. In an inversion of Rachel Whiteread’s process of making positive volumes out of negative space, Chromy delivers a negative space from a solid volume: the human body. The marble consequently becomes a substance of power, a robust material, as opposed to one that engages in the optical illusion of weightlessness – a very different approach to the artist’s works in bronze, that seem to defy gravitational forces by displaying the animation of the human body.
All of this appears to serve very well Chromy’s purpose of creating a post-humanist work whose very solidity grounds the sculpture in a direct connection with down-to-earth concerns of human conscience instead of the mythological subjects of Greco Roman literature or even the particular ethical principles that are derived from the Judaic-Christian moralistic traditions that put the body at the centre of the representation. In this way this work is freed from the original gendered inspiration as representing ‘old woman weighed down by suffering’ – there is an illusion of a body (anybody) and the cloak envelops an empty space which viewers must inhabit with their own bodies and interpretations.
