Anna Chromy is an artist who evolved from surrealist oil paintings to sculpture in 1993 and has become the artist of monumental public sculptures, mainly in bronze, which have been positioned in a number of notable locations in European countries and China. Although the majority of her works could be seen as hyper real in the delineation of the human body, and eminate from stories linked to ancient Greek and Roman mythology such as the fables of Orpheus and Sisyphus, Chromy claims one of her primary influences as surrealism. These influences are mirrored in a number of art pieces which depict human figures with shrouded faces, missing limbs along with wheels unattached from vehicles. Chromy has carved marble as the material for her latest and most significant sculpture, the Cloak of Conscience, which questions several issues about 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 substantial size of Chromy’s Cloak of Conscience, and the whiteness of the Carrara marble, with its origin at the quarry of Michelangelo, unavoidably evokes what some academics have termed an ‘excess’ in reference, for instance, to the art of Bernini: skin and cloth depicted from stone – the very opposite of its original material qualities. This has also been written up as the ‘art of petrifaction’, recalling Ovid’s tale of how the movement and ‘diverse attitudes’ of some marble sculptures can be such that they could be incorrectly recognized as legitimate human beings, even in a situation of conflict, which is a reverse function in handling the conventional ambiguity of sculpture.
The apparent aim of artists like Michelangelo and Bernini was to achieve the possibility of marble showing as both robust and flowing at the same time and also to suggest a flexibility and weightlessness that is radically opposed to its material quality. However Chromy references this norm through an inversion of the illusion of rock as flesh and cloth. First of all there is not a visible analogue of the human form with which we can engage in the illusion of soft tissue, which almost always calls for at least partial nudity. Instead the art is dominated by the folds of a cloak and the absent filling of a body, which implies weight – so much weight in fact that it might be called a temple (or an ‘archi-sculpture’ to use Chromy’s term) even a ‘chapel’, and thus it possibly provides more in common with the application of marble in architecture than in art. In an inversion of Rachel Whiteread’s method of creating positive volumes from negative space, Chromy delivers a negative space from a solid volume: the human body. The marble consequently becomes a material of energy, a robust material, rather than the one that engages in the impression of weightlessness – an entirely diverse approach to Chromy’s works in bronze, that manage to defy gravitational forces by capturing the animation of the human body.
All of this appears to serve very well Chromy’s purpose of creating a post-humanist work whose very solidity centres the sculpture in a direct relationship with down-to-earth concerns of human conscience instead of the extraterrestial subjects of Greco Roman literature or even the particular ethical positions that are derived from the Judaic-Christian humanist traditions which place the body as the focus of the artwork. Because of this this art is freed from the original gendered inspiration as representing ‘old woman weighed down by suffering’ – there is an illusion of a body (anybody) and the cloak shrouds a void which viewers must inhabit with their own bodies and interpretations.
