Desolation

myminifactory

The artwork belongs to a collection of pieces designed specifically for new pantheons built during the early 1900s. Artists crafted sculptures of angels or Virtues that featured women overcome by grief, their faces etched with sorrow, and allegorical figures reflecting profound thoughts and feelings about death such as despair, grief, or resignation. Simply put, they modeled desolate, contemplative, and enigmatic women without regard for their beauty. The attributes these works needed to convey the general spiritual state led artists to create languid, bowed female figures with long hair dressed in simple tunics that clung tightly to their skin. Although this style wasn't adopted universally, female figures dominated and their formal characteristics became an integral part of the artistic language used by modernist sculptors in the pieces they created for collectors, leaving out elements more suited to funerary images associated with death. Desolation is rich in emotion, a hallmark of the Symbolist movement. The most striking feature of the artwork is its ability to convey inner emotions with ease. The Hermeticism and mystical nature the sculpture evokes are rooted in its posture. The hidden gaze, the closed composition of the body, and its curved contours seem to enclose the figure within its own silence, inviting contemplation and introspection.