Anna Chromy is an artist who evolved from surrealist oil paintings to sculpture in 1993 and is the artist of monumental public sculptures, mainly in bronze and marble, that have been placed in numerous well known locations in Europe and The far east. Even though the majority of her works appear to be hyper real in the delineation of the human body, and derive from stories related to Greco-Roman mythology including the stories of Orpheus and Sisyphus, Chromy claims one of her principal influences as surrealism. These influences are shown in many art pieces that portray human torsos with veiled faces, missing limbs along with wheels detached from vehicles. Chromy has used marble as the cloth for her latest and largest public sculpture, the Cloak of Conscience, which raises numerous issues regarding classical and modern sculpture.
<i>Now, at last, Phineus regrets the unjust fight, but what can he do? He sees the figures in diverse attitudes, and recognises the men, and calling on each by name, asks his help. Disbelieving, he touches the bodies nearest to him. They are marble.</i>
Ovid, Metamorphosis, Book V
The massive dimensions of Chromy’s Cloak of Conscience, and the whiteness of the Carrara marble, with its connection to the Cave of Michelangelo, surely recalls what some academics have called an ‘excess’ in reference, for example, to the art of Bernini: skin and fabric created from stone – the perfect opposite of its original material properties. This is sometimes referred to as the ‘art of petrifaction’, recalling Ovid’s tale of the way movement and ‘diverse attitudes’ of some marble sculptures are so that they could be incorrectly recognized for real human beings, even in circumstances of battle, which is usually a reverse function in addressing the standard ambiguity of sculpture.
The hope of artists like Michelangelo and Bernini was to reach the possibility of marble appearing as both strong and flowing concurrently and to indicate a flexibility and weightlessness that is radically in contrast with its material quality. However Chromy references this custom through an inversion of the illusion of marble as flesh and cloth. First of all there is no visible sight of the human body with which we are able to engage in the impression of soft tissue, which almost always needs at least partial nudity. Rather the art is dominated by the characteristics of cloth and the absent volume of a body, which indicates weight – so much weight in fact that we can call this a building (or an ‘archi-sculpture’ to use Chromy’s term) even a ‘chapel’, and thus it possibly offers more in common with the use of marble in architecture than in sculpture. As an inversion of Rachel Whiteread’s procedure of delivering positive volume from negative space, Chromy delivers a negative space out of a solid volume: the human body. The marble consequently becomes a component of power, a robust material, as opposed to one that gives us the illusion of weightlessness – a completely diverse approach to the artist’s works in bronze, that seem to defy gravity by capturing the animation of the human body.
All of this seems to serve very well Chromy’s intention of developing a post-humanist work whose very solidity positions the sculpture in a direct connection with down-to-earth material concerns instead of the extraterrestial subjects of Greco Roman literature or even the particular ethical principles that derive from the Judaic-Christian humanist traditions which put the body as the focus of the representation. As a result this work is set free from the meaning of the painting it originated from as representing ‘old woman weighed down by suffering’ – there is an illusion of a body (anybody) and the cloak shrouds an unseen place which visitors must inhabit with their own bodies and interpretations.
