Le Dard PHILIPPE HIQUILY

Le Dard by Philippe Hiquily is a unique work of art.
Signed and dated “HIQUILY 57” on the base.

Inspired by the Venus de Lespugue, Philippe Hiquily has reproduced this idol of fertility in his work throughout his life. Philippe Hiquily's work is dominated, in a way, by the multiple and excessive forms of the female body. With a keen eye on the prehistoric callipyge effigy he discovered at the Musée de l'Homme as a student, he transforms these bodies and metamorphoses them according to his imagination. According to Alain Jouffroy, the Dard is one of these women's objects, offering itself to spectators in a playful posture. For him, it wasn't until “Robert Müller or Hiquily that eroticism was once again fully restored in a sculptural work”.

Philippe Hiquily has borrowed from Germaine Richier the use of lines that go beyond the figure, but for the sculptor, they are a means of projecting the figure into a space and signifying or even creating movement. Hiquily wishes to “make works that touch nothing, to suspend a volume in a magnetic field, alone or in a coupling...”.

These voluptuous bodies are crossed, marked, by long needles that add dynamism and presence. The silhouettes in Philippe Hiquily's works are recognizable by the amplification of the breasts and buttocks, which initiates another visual relationship with his sculptures of the order of “an invisible movement of the image”.

Using the welded-iron technique, Philippe Hiquily brings his callipygic effigies into the industrial world, transforming salvaged material into a sculptural material with an appearance akin to tanned skin.

“My work has always revolved around the female body, no doubt because the male body always seems to me to be identical to itself. Conversely, I always see the woman's body in its singularity, as unique.”

Philippe Hiquily

Former collections:

Zachary SCOTT, New York ;

Michel MORABITO, Paris

Private collection