Collection of the artist
Buschlen Mowatt Gallery, Vancouver
Private Collection, Vancouver
Mayberry Fine Art, Winnipeg
Private Collection, Toronto
Literature
Sorel Etrog, quoted in Pierre Restany, Sorel Etrog, London/Munich, 2001, pages 32-33
Ihor Holubizky, Sorel Etrog: Five Decades, exhibition catalogue, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, April 27 - September 29, 2013, page 13
Following Sorel Etrog’s Screw and Bolt series, works from the Hinges series of 1973 to 1979 suggest the presence of a complex anthropomorphic energy, both physical and psychic. Of the two groups which comprise the series-Introverts and Extroverts-it is perhaps the former which most clearly exemplifies the artist’s ongoing pursuit of a simplified sculptural language for conveying the complexity of human experience. Like the “Link” motif, one of Etrog’s most profound expressions of existential ambiguity, the articulated hinge gives form to a tension between movement and stillness, between freedom and restraint. A metaphor for life itself, the contradiction inherent in such a state of suspended animation was a central preoccupation of the work of Etrog’s collaborators, the existential writers Eugène Ionesco and Samuel Beckett. The hinge, writes Ihor Holubizky, functions both as “a tangible link to the European avant-garde between the wars and a hinge to the past, the Mediterranean world of antiquity and non-Western culture; the hinges, metaphorically, bring the past into direct contact with the present.”
Sculptures from the slender, upright Extrovert series function by “employing hinges as an articulation device”, and resemble active walking figures “concerned with open space and implied movement,” Etrog explains. Exuding a dense psychic energy, the contrasting Introverts are studies in composure. In this elegant bronze work from 1976, a static rectilinear mass atop a gently fluted base turns inward from hinges along two of its vertical axes. For the artist, the hinge not only suggests an implicit range of motion with limitless permutations, but also serves as an effective metaphor for expressing the quiet interiority of the human psyche. This work is a particularly refined product of one of the artist’s most fruitful periods of experimentation.
