2016, Bugatti 100
Sladmore Gallery, London
7th Jun 2016 - 14th Jul 2016 , Sladmore Gallery, London
2016 marks the centenary year of Rembrandt Bugatti’s untimely death.
This exhibition commemorates the life and career of this extraordinary sculptor, gathering together rarely exhibited artifacts from our archives, including a rare group of sculptures, drawings, self-portraits and related memorabilia, some of which are being shown for the first time.
One of the unique casts on display during the exhibition is the ‘Lion Cub with Greyhound in between his Paws’, 1906. These two animals were particularly well known at Antwerp Zoo. A greyhound bitch, an animal that would normally be prey for members of the lion family, fostered an orphaned lion cub. The lion cub was named Atlas and was well-known to Bugatti– many photographs exist of him with the cub in his arms. Indeed, it is said that after a gap of a couple of years, Atlas immediately recognized Bugatti as he approached his cage. So taken was the sculptor with this unusual partnership, that he created a companion piece some six months prior to this, when the cub was only three months old.
About The Artist
Born in Milan in 1884, Rembrandt Bugatti was one of the most talented sculptors of the twentieth century. In a career that spanned little more than a dozen years before it was cut short in 1916 by his tragic suicide at the age of 31, he created a prodigious body of work. His art combined huge technical finesse, formal beauty, intensity of expression and subtle stylistic inventiveness.
Bugatti regularly visited the zoos at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, and Antwerp, and he always modelled his works directly in front of the animals that were his subjects. At the age of nineteen, he came into contact in Paris with the bronze founder Adrien A. Hébrard, and held his first exhibition at the Galerie Hébrard in 1904.