Listening

Maurice Blik

(Dutch/English, b. 1939)

Signed Blik
Inscribed Milwyn Casting and stamped with the bull's head hallmark
Numbered 1/9
Bronze with a green patina
Height: 18 3/4" (48 cm)

Conceived in 2017, this example cast in 2018
Edition 1 of 9

“Blik’s creativity has been both prodigious and profoundly moving. His huge bronze figures typically emerge from black metallic masses like butterflies from cocoons and stretch upwards, their fingers often just touching some mysterious shining object above them. You don’t have to be an art critic to grasp the metaphor. This might be the artist emerging from his dark past. Or perhaps it is the indomitable human spirit rising from apparent devastation to reach for the beauty that will not be crushed.”

Richard Morrison, The Times, London

Born in Amsterdam in 1939, by the age of four Maurice Blik was faced with the questions and choices that philosophers, artists and religions have left unanswered for centuries.

Blik has lived in England since being liberated from Bergen Belsen, where he was taken as a small child from his birthplace. The ability to come to terms with this experience and to confront the horrors he had witnessed is central to his work.

From the 1980s onwards, the sculptor created a series of horses' heads, which marked the beginning of his figurative career. After teaching at art college for a number of years, the artist gave up teaching in 1991 to focus solely on his work as a sculptor.

In 1996, he was elected President of the Royal Society of British Sculptors, of which he is still a member. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

Maurice Blik works in the UK and USA, where he was awarded residency by the US Government as 'a person of extraordinary artistic ability.’ His artworks, both in monumental and small scale, are part of important private collections around the world.