Revered as one of Canada’s great multi-faceted artists, Sorel Etrog’s prolific body of work in sculpture has left an indelible mark on the sculptural lexicon within Canadian art history. Having experienced the Holocaust in his youth in his native land, Romania, Etrog later fled with his family to Israel before moving to New York and finally settling in Toronto. Studying and producing early painted wood constructions and wood sculptures, Etrog’s relationship with Sam and Ayala Zacks propelled his career forward. As patrons and collectors of Etrog’s works, they championed the artist’s growth to produce commanding bronzes.
Expanding upon the modern abstract forms, Etrog moved to represent anthropomorphic configurations in his bronze sculptural works of the early 1960s. Produced in 1963, “Sunbird II” typifies two important developments in the artist’s maturation from the late 1950s throughout his most prolific periods. Etrog explains:
“Two important developments were taking place in my sculpture regarding the relationship between mass and weight and the base. I wanted to be free to use large masses or weights without them sinking into or flattening on to the base...The first development was the standing figure...the second development, for the more abstract works, was a ‘wheel’ in contact with the base (”Sunbird”, later “Survivors are Not Heroes”, “Sunlife” etc.). This has a kind of cradle movement, giving the impression of weightlessness, and the optical illusion is that they are balanced and stand on their own, independent of the base.”
With the ‘wheel’ form in contact with the base of the sculpture, a natural tension is developed between the solid undulating form and the delicate rest of the wheel upon the base, taking the weight of the work in its entirety. For Etrog, space and movement was paramount in his works. The eye moves around “Sunbird II”, following the bronze curves and resting in the negative space created between the elements of the sculpture. The work invites the viewer to explore the space in and around the form. To examine the organic and geometric shapes of the work, while considering the point of departure and final return when experiencing the work in the round.
