Stretch, 1976

Buschlen Mowatt Gallery, Vancouver
Private Collection, Florida
By descent to the present Private Collection, United States

Theodore Allen Heinrich, Introduction to Etrog: Painting on Wood/Sculptures/Drawings, Toronto, 1959, unpaginated
Ihor Holubizky, Sorel Etrog: Five Decades, Toronto, 2013, page 13

After the Screw and Bolt series, Sorel Etrog's Hinges period (1973-1979) further simplified the human figure. During these years, he explored the relationship between the human body and mechanical forms, using hinges and articulated joints to suggest movement, psychological tension and the complexities of human experience. Remarking on the inspiration for this new phase in his work, the artist 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."

Stretch stands at fifty-three inches tall, with a distinct human-like presence. Its figurative shape is enforced by the two curved tubes connecting the base to the top, resembling a person stretching their arms behind their head. A hinge separates the torso from the legs. Describing Etrog's understated yet compelling sculpture, Theodore Allen Heinrich wrote: "[Etrog] has a strong 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."