Adolescence 1957

Etienne Hajdu created this sculpture, Adolescence, by carving into a block of marble. I can almost feel Hajdu chipping away, trying to find the figure within the stone, working from intuition rather than a fixed idea, and I wonder what it was like for him as he carved, deciding where to cut and where to stop. The marble has black veining running through it which lends a sense of interior life. You can see how the stone's materiality shapes the sculpture. It's hard and cool, yet Hajdu coaxes out a sensuous form, the suggestion of a shoulder or hip. It reminds me of other artists preoccupied with the human figure such as Henry Moore or Barbara Hepworth, who were also invested in the qualities of stone. There’s an ongoing conversation between sculptors across time. They’re all trying to say something about what it means to be human. And ultimately it’s up to us to figure out what that is!