Torso [1] is the first in a series of sculptures titled Torso that recall the classical torsos of human bodies in museums’ collections of antiquities. The sculptures’ height was chosen to match the dimensions of the Belvedere Torso, a marble fragment whose latter-day history resonates with the vicissitudes of trade, ownership, and idealization under today’s precarious conditions.

The models for the sculptures were derived from PET water bottles, a staple of the garbage that our civilization produces on a daily basis. For the translation of the consumer product into a sculpture a pressure-sensitive synthetic rigid foam is used that is receptive to traces of the passage of time. In this way, the materiality of Torso [1] also reflects our fragile relationship with nature.

With the sculpture, the bottle awakens to a life of its own, gesturing toward the human body’s reliance on water, but also toward the body as a museum display object and sculptural dream of everlasting life. The temporal horizon of the life of our species, meanwhile, appears to be shrinking like discarded PET bottles. We are, in the end, one: bodies, art, and bottles, caught up in our collapsing ecosystems.

Nine Reliefs after Torso [1]

The series of reliefs derives from the surface structure of Torso [1]. Reproduced in photographs of details and then edited, the abstract motifs are manufactured in a process in which they are effectively washed out of the material. To achieve this appearance, a mill is controlled so as to carve the master images out of the rigid foam while also subtly subjecting them to random alteration. Peculiar flowing structures result, topographies of the imaginary. With their moiré effects (moiré is French for “watered”), they might look like eroding landscapes from the moment they come into being.

The dimensions of the reliefs tie the series back to the point of departure for Torso, the 1.5-liter PET bottle Saskia Mineralwasser Classic, out of which the models for Torso are made.