Girl on a Chair — Polish Expressive Figurative Bronze, c. 1998; 33cm, est 3.1kg

Solid cast bronze · 33 cm high · Unsigned · Acquired Warsaw, Poland, c. 1988

A slight girl sits high on a chair that has been stretched far past reason — four spindle legs rising nearly a metre in miniature, carrying her small body up into the air where her feet will never reach the floor. She grips the seat edge either side of her. Her face is turned slightly, calm, unbothered. The whole piece balances gravity against lightness: a solid, weighty bronze that reads as almost weightless.

The modelling is entirely hand cast preserves every mark of it. The torso and limbs are built from pressed, faceted planes of clay; the chair's uprights carry the hammered, irregular facture of worked wax. Nothing is smoothed or corrected. The patina is a deep chocolate brown with warm coppery lights breaking through on the raised edges — the shoulders, the knees, the crossbar of the chair back — where decades of handling have brought up the metal beneath.

Stylistically the work belongs to the European post-Giacometti tradition of attenuated figurative bronze: elongation used as emotional language rather than description, and a rough unfinished surface kept deliberately as evidence of the sculptor's hand. Its more particular ancestry is Polish. The 1990s in Poland saw sculptors move sharply back toward the figure as the most direct available means of expression, and hand-kneaded, disproportionate, deliberately unrefined bronze figures were a signature of Warsaw-trained sculptors working in the 80's and 90's. 

Possibly the work of a student of Grzegorz Kowalski but the piece is unsigned, as a good deal of sculpture sold through the state art-trade galleries of late-communist Poland was although this 1990's piece was bought from a private, contemporary galley and has remained in the same private collection since. We offer it as an unattributed work of that school and moment rather than under any artist's name, and it is priced accordingly — which is precisely the opportunity. This is a sophisticated, museum-idiom sculpture at a fraction of what a signed example of the same quality and period commands.

Provenance: Purchased from a gallery in Warsaw, Poland, c. 1998; private UK collection thereafter.