Pablo Wendel
(32 years old. Born in Germany. Lives in: London)
Royal College of Art
Born 1980 in Tieringen, Germany.
From 1999 till 2002 Pablo did an apprenticeship in Stone Sculpture. Subsequently he pursued this direction by studying sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Stuttgart, where his Professors included Werner Pokorny, Udo Koch, Alexandra Ranner and Christian Jankowski. In 2007 Wendel studied as a foreign student at the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou, where he did his performance and video wor ...[more]
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Work of art I would like to make
Pygmalion is a long-term project, which is simultaneously filmic, performative and sculptural. I would like to use film in the style of a documentary to unfold the creative process of a classical marble sculpture. This project is based on the antique anecdote about the artist Pygmalion who desperately creates the most perfect and ideal form out of marble only to desire her possessing a real human existence.
I would like to use the Greek myth of Pygmalion as a thinking model for this project. Pygmalion tells the tale of a sculptor who decides to create a sculpture of the perfect form. Pygmalion was exhausted and exasperated by all women and so decided to create his very own ideal female sculpture. However whilst creating this sculpture Pygmalion falls desperately in love with the marble and begins to wish the impossible; that she was real. Luckily for Pygmalion the Gods, at this time, were peaceful and attended to his wish that the sculpture become real and so Pygmalion was awarded his ideal woman.
This structure of Pygmalion and his wish for the ideal woman will form the basis of this project. This project also wishes to question the whole process of sculpture, by resuscitating the idea that the sculptor creates life.
I would like to physically create this ideal form in a marble sculpture, using my acquired techniques from my stone apprenticeship, which will require several months to execute. The actual working process on the stone demonstrates an act, which is in-between, a classical stone craft and an erotic possessive domination. The working on the marble block will gradually transform into a performative act and after a while the original unattainable wish of the artist of perfection changes to that of destruction. The film follows the artist while he carves his female figure out of stone and witnesses his development of an erotic interaction with the marble and forces his vision of form upon her. Making the sculpture more perfect; continuously and ambitiously investigating this concept of perfection, with the thinking that in a stone there has to be more than just a form; With an inevitable end where both the artist and his vision slowly and subtlety self-destruct.
Boundaries begin to blur and one begins to realize that there isn’t a clear division between culprit and victim and the mediums of film, sculpture and performance melt together and dissolve, resulting in confusion between what is actually being enacted and what is imagined. The sculpting process becomes a performative act as an audience begins to recognize that this is more than a classical sculptor carving into the stone, but actually carving away the stone to reveal only dust left from the original block of marble. Thus only leaving the film as the only medium left to document the action and tell the story.
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My Artworks (6)
Click on the images to enlarge
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