Enter One Indiabulls Centre this summer and you will be punctuated in your step, on more than one occasion, by Lorenzo Quinn's sculpted hands. Open and welcoming hands, closed and enveloping hands; hands holding a vintage Vespa, hands surrendering to gravity—and sometimes even defying it. "I wanted to sculpt what is considered the hardest and most technically challenging part of the human body. The hand holds so much power—the power to love, to hate, to create, to destroy," says Quinn.
The Spain-based sculptor's art precedes him: having previously taken over public spaces worldwide—think Tree of Life (Birmingham, 2005), The Force of Nature (Singapore, 2008) and Hand of God (St. Petersburg, 2011), to name a few—and most recently, the newly opened state-of-the-art Gallery Odyssey in Mumbai.
His eponymous series, In the Hands of Lorenzo Quinn, is the first solo showcase at the gallery—launched in India in association with London's Halcyon Gallery by Divya Gehlaut—and is the contemporary Italian artist's first time in the Indian art scene. "I am 49-years-old and so I'm accomplishing two dreams; one is to travel to India, and the other, to have an art show in India," he says.
A surrealist painter-turned-sculptor, Quinn's work is an attempted symbiosis of poetry and art (every sculpture is conceived in writing and a poetic text often serves as a companion piece to it). "I love to use poetry in my art to communicate feelings. And I'm always looking for the positive; what unites people, not what divides them," he adds. This universality and harmony is true, at both, a figurative and a functional level. When it comes to his sculpting process, Quinn prefers "modelling rather than chiselling and chipping away".
Quinn's two-decade-long artistic career has been a continued effort at conveying universal concepts such as love, truth, peace, and family. "I think that art is really communication. The reason why I do art is because I have things to say. But, of course, I want to have a dialogue with people; it's not a monologue. If I have things to say, I need for them to be understood," he explains—and, no doubt, his work compels a conversation.
Vogue picks hands down the 5 must-see sculptures that will resonate with you—as they have with us—long after you leave the gallery:
1. Chess piece - Horse (bronze on granite base)
2. Hand Of God (bronze)
3. The Four Loves (bronze, aluminium, Tilia wood, stainless steel and red tavertine)
4. The Two Sides Of Nature (leather and resin)
5. What Goes Around Comes Around (aluminium and Cor-ten steel on stainless steel base)
'In the Hands of Lorenzo Quinn' will be on display at Gallery Odyssey, Tower 2, One Indiabulls Centre, Elphinstone Road, Mumbai-400013 until mid-July.
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