David Altmejd
b. 1974, Canada
Untitled 3 (Bronze Bodybuilders), 2016
Bronze
89.7 x 67 x 65 cm
Untitled 3 (Bronze Bodybuilders) is a sculpture from David Altmejd’s The Bodybuilders series, featuring a life-size human figure covered in disfigured hands and their imprints into its form. As the plaster slab that the sculpture stands upon sees its material being dug into by the movement of hands, one can track the overall movement of these hands upwards such that the hands presented at the front of the sculpture’s figure appear to be building and moulding the shape of a man from the plaster material. Thus, David Altmejd highlights a sense of power in making the subject of the sculpture its own creator, further emphasised by the hands becoming the face of the bodybuilder. Metaphorically, as the material carries a history relating to its use in classical European sculpture, the sculpture also speaks to the idea of constructing oneself out of one’s own memories, offering a critical look at our image of the European man in the art history canon.
Photo: Vincent Dillo/ WHITE CUBE
David Altmejd (b. 1974) is a Canadian sculptor interested in exploring ideas surrounding the self. A perfect object, to Altmejd, is something “seductive and extremely repulsive at the same time”, and he furthers his fascination with duality with his sculptural endeavours, which straddle the line between the beautiful and the grotesque, figurative representation and abstraction, the interior and exterior. Through radical portrayals of the body via a mix between traditional processes like casting and idiosyncratic forms of bricolage, Altmejd also captures the mind, the imagination, and the soul in their experience of the material world. Holding an MFA from Columbia University, his numerous international exhibitions include a major survey exhibition Flux, which travelled from Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris to MUDAM in Luxembourg and the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal (2014–15). Altmejd also represented Canada in 2007 at the 52nd Venice Biennale.
