The city destroyed 1951

Ossip Zadkine's sculpture, "The City Destroyed," wrestles with pain and resilience through bronze or stone. Look at the roughness of the surface, it's not smoothed over but left raw, each gouge and mark telling a story of the artist's struggle with the material. The figure seems to be torn apart, and there's this gaping hole where the heart should be. Is it absence or presence? It reminds me of Picasso, and how he used planes to show us different points of view all at once. There's a strange kind of beauty in the way the figure reaches up, despite the violence. Zadkine's sculpture doesn’t let us turn away, he offers us the mess and ambiguity of trauma. The artist seems to be asking, how do we keep creating, when everything feels shattered?