Attributed to Antonio Frilli

Attributed to ANTONIO FRILLI (Italy, active 1860-1902).
"Ballerina", late 19th century.
Carrara marble.
Measurements: 100-125 x 31 cm.

The essence and distinction of the incipient Art Deco aesthetic is sublimely advanced in this sculpture made around 1900. It represents a young dancer, slender and stylized, performing a complex and dynamic dance step, sitting on her legs and arching her body backwards in a contorted posture. She raises her arms in a hypnotic warp, letting her wavy hair fall and flutter into the void. It is a realistic work in its modeling but rigorous and geometric in its composition, perfectly reflecting the aesthetic basis of Art Deco. Within the sculpture of this period were frequent such representations, preferably of dancers, which are based on a classical approach, synthetic forms and serene and elegant movement. Although they are harmonic and balanced anatomies like those of ancient sculpture, during Art Deco a certain exoticism is sought both in the themes and in the formal, combining the archaic and noble hieratism of the faces with open and dynamic postures and exotic clothing.

Antonio Frilli was a Florentine sculptor who specialized in marble and alabaster statues. In 1883, Frilli established his first workshop in via dei Fossi, Florence, where he worked with a few assistants on refined medium-sized painted alabaster and large white Carrara marble statues for private villas and monumental cemeteries. His works decorate famous cemeteries such as Porte Sante and Allori in Florence. After his death, a marble portrait of Frilli was carved in his workshop and placed on his family tomb in the Cimitero degli Allori. Frilli and his gallery were well known in Europe, the United States and Australia, as he participated in several world's fair exhibitions. He was in Philadelphia for the Centennial Exhibition of 1876, and in 1881 his statues and garden furniture were exhibited at the Italian Pavilion in Melbourne, Australia. In 1904, two years after Frilli's death, his son Umberto participated in the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis (Missouri), where one of his father's works - a sculpture of a "Woman in a Hammock" in white Carrara marble - won the Grand Prize and 6 gold medals. In 1999, the same masterpiece was sold by Sotheby's with an auction estimate of $800,000. More recently, Frilli's 1892 sculpture "Sweet Dreams," featuring a life-size reclining nude in a hammock and exhibited at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco in 1915, sold at a Los Angeles auction house. A 2013 novel by Gary Rinehart, "Nude Sleeping in a Hammock," is a fictionalized account of the statue's owners from 1892 and how the sculpture affected their fortunes.