Young girl with folded hands - Ossip Zadkine

Reproduction in gilded "chrome-plated" resin

Shortly after his arrival in Paris in 1910, Ossip Zadkine (1890-1967) abandoned his apprenticeship at the Beaux-Arts, preferring to break with academicism to embark on a search for forms more suitable for rendering life, through the simplification or accentuation of forms, on the model of Egyptian or primitive art. In this, he joined a larger artistic movement, which affected sculpture as well as painting. His Young Girl with Folded Hands is a work from his early period. It already reveals his desire to find a personal style - although it can be compared in some ways to that of Modigliani, with whom he was close at the time - and evocative. Zadkine is far removed from the academic conventions he violates here thanks to the clean and highly simplified lines of the sculpture, giving precedence to geometric shapes over realism, but also thanks to the unusual cut of the bust, where the girl's arms - which would be absent in an academic bust - are the central element.
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