Felix Landau Gallery, Los Angeles
Private Collection, Ontario
Literature
Pierre Restany, Sorel Etrog, London/Munich, 2011, page 77
Alma Mikulinsky, Sorel Etrog: Life and Work [online publication], Art Canada Institute, 2019, page 67
Produced during a particularly dark period in the artist’s life, “Homage to Dr. Martin Luther King” expresses the cultural and social tensions of the 1960s and 1970s. During this period, Sorel Etrog had witnessed the flooding of the Arno river in Florence, which devastated the iconic cultural city. This event spurred on painful memories of the Holocaust and the Second World War for the young artist. In addition, Etrog suffered a life-threatening car accident that required many years of recovery. The link within his practice provided Etrog a method to express the fear, anxiety and frustration of these traumas, developing an emotional tension. A strong empathetic connection between the artist and the civil rights leader is honoured in this work.
On April 4, 1968, Dr. King was fatally shot while standing on the balcony of the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis, Tennessee. King had travelled to Memphis in support of striking African American sanitation workers and had delivered the now famous “Mountain Top” speech. While working on a bronze sculpture, Etrog had learned of the tragic assassination and decided to execute the work in honour of Dr. King, utilizing twisted knots and links.
Etrog remarks on this emotional exploration through the link in the personified forms noting that “my main concern was not to externalize their agony and pain, but rather to express their internal screams—their mouths and tongues tightly linked together.” The artist effectively trapped the emotional condition of the sitter in an interlocking web of mechanical connections of unreleased screams. Expanding on this exploration, Etrog recalled: “I am witnessing how these past immediate experiences are getting in my new work. I feel certain hardness; the fluid line is being replaced by the links. It gives a more mechanical look. Yet I want to believe that I still speak about the human condition.”
“Homage to Dr. Martin Luther King” expertly captures the internal struggle and contained emotion of the revolutionary figure and all he represents, while expressing the unseen.
