Acquired directly from the artist (1995)
Private Collection, Toronto
Literature
Pierre Restany, Sorel Etrog, London/Munich, 2001, pages 32-33
Ihor Holubizky, Sorel Etrog: Five Decades, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, 2013, page 13
Following the artist’s Screw and Bolt series, the Hinges period (1973- 1979) emphasized the geometric bare essentials of the figure in a continued pursuit of a simplified sculptural language. Remarking on the inspiration for this new phase in his work, Sorel Etrog explains: “On a vacation in Israel, visiting my family, I picked up a child’s drawing pad and began to draw doodles of flat and organic surfaces connected by hinges. At first, new ideas feel like illegitimate children of the brain. The hinge started to obsess me and so I adopted it.” 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.”
Etrog worked simultaneously in two styles within the Hinges series, which was rare for the artist; these two categories were labelled Introverts and Extroverts. While Introvert sculptures are geometric abstractions that incorporate hinges, “Manon” is categorized as an Extrovert, which is described as “employing hinges as an articulation device”, and resemble active walking figures “concerned with open space and implied movement,” as explained by Etrog. “Manon” stands at over four feet tall, occupying a human-like presence in a space and demanding the viewer’s attention. Its figurative shape and physical presence are well-suited to this category of Extrovert. The most conspicuous hinge in the sculpture is present in the column in the lower portion of the sculpture, alluding to a waistline, mirroring the concept of the human body bending forward at the waist. Unlike many of Etrog’s Extroverts which appear to be in motion, “Manon” is an elegant and stoic sculpture, merely suggesting the capability of movement.
Describing Etrog’s understated yet compelling sculpture, Theodore Allen Heinrich wrote: “[Etrog] has a strongly musical sense for rhythms, balances and silence. He has a profound capacity for experiencing and conveying emotion. His work is imbued with poetic fantasy... Above all he has something to say. The adventurous art of Sorel Etrog is centred on increasingly simple but constantly more meaningful form in conjunction with intricately subtle balances of movement, weight and colour.”
