Acquavella Galleries Palm Beach is pleased to present Harumi Klossowska de Rola: Sacred Woods, its first solo exhibition of the Swiss-based artist Harumi Klossowska de Rola. Titled Sacred Woods, the exhibition features new and recent sculptures that explore the artist’s reverential fascination with the beauty of the natural and untamed world. Inspired by the grace and majesty of the animal kingdom, the show includes over a dozen sensitively rendered animals crafted out of bronze, alabaster, or wood; each sculpture is ennobled with a sense of spirit, physicality, and emotion. Sentient and animate, her artworks function as living, totemic entities, creating a bridge between nature and mankind.

The passage of time and a rich sense of history is integral to Harumi’s work. Her handcrafted sculptures incorporatematerials layered with age and history, embracing how mediums such as bronze will evolve and oxidize over time. With an exquisite attention to detail and surface, they feature rich patinas, often highlighted with passages of gold leaf. Each exquisitely rendered sculpture begins with extensive preparatory drawings and modeling before the artist arrives at the final form. To make her sculptures, Harumi collaborates closely with skilled foundry artisans, often at the Fonderie de Coubertin in Saint-Rémy-lès-Chevreuse or the Fonderie Patrick Laroche in Paris, where many of the sculptures are cast. Klossowska’s command of material and her keen attention to detail across her artistic practice is evident in each object.

Drawing inspiration from myriad sources, the artist’s practice is informed by an array of cultures and aesthetic traditions, from Ancient Egyptian, Greek and Roman mythology to Art Nouveau and Romanticism and Japanese Shintoism and the aesthetic of wabi-sabi. Klossowska’s studio practice is equally influenced by her personal history and environment. Residing and working on the property of her childhood home, located in the town of Rossinière in the Swiss Alps, the artist has kept a dialogue with the nature and the woods that surround her. Her sculptures combine inspiration from the wild animals inhabiting these forests with historical and mythical creatures from ancient cultures and civilizations.

A work in the exhibition that typifies the artist’s practice is Daal (2022), which takes the form of a carefully posed doe rendered in patinated bronze accented with highlights of gold leaf. Here the animal lacks a chest and abdomen, a composition that often appears in the artist’s sculptures, resulting in an interplay between solid and negative space, inhabiting both the visible and invisible realm. The gold leaf accenting the head and ears lends a mystical, idol-like flourish to the figure.

Art historian Olivier Berggruen writes in an essay for the exhibition’s catalogue of the artist’s approach: “Harumi is familiar with such notions of beauty that stem from nature; yet she is keenly aware that the practice of applied arts to which she is devoted also involves a process of stylization, in which the natural world is abstracted, and particular elements are idealized, others dismissed. This process is arbitrary and requires considerable skill and imagination in equal measure.”

All photos by Adrien Dirand.