Seated Figure 1917

Jacques Lipchitz carved this 'Seated Figure' from stone. It’s all about how a sculptor grapples with mass and form. I mean, look at the way he’s simplified the figure into these chunky, geometric shapes. It’s almost like he's building with blocks, right? The surface has this rough, almost granular texture, which gives it a real tactile quality. You can practically feel the weight of the stone, the resistance it offered to the artist’s chisel. I love the way the light catches on all those little facets and edges, creating these subtle shifts in tone. There's this cool tension between abstraction and representation. You can still make out the basic elements of a figure – the head, the torso, the legs – but they’re all abstracted into these simplified forms. It makes you think about what it means to represent the human body, and how much you can take away before it stops being recognizable. It reminds me a bit of some of Picasso's cubist sculptures. It’s like they are both trying to break things down and see what happens.