José-Maria DAVID
José-Maria DAVID or The passion for Beauty was born on August 21th 1944. He spent his childhood near the forest of Gâvre, a forest that was one of the main hunting grounds of the Dukes of Brittany in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Until the age of 11, a preceptor takes care of his education. Between tales and legends, he prefers to read biographies of famous people because they are "true stories". At that time, served by a fertile imagination, he gives life to the heroes of his childhood by shaping them in modeling clay or later in the clay that he extracts from the surrounding nature. Later, when sculpture becomes not only a passion but also its raison d'être, its relationship to childhood, its purity and its authenticity, will remain one of the determinants and constants of its creativity, as well as that he likes to remind him: "My sculptures, they must remain within reach of childhood, because the child is pure. When I sculpt, in front of clay I become a child in front of his toy. I need the innocence of my childhood. I make my man toys as I made my childhoods' toys. "
The trace of his skillful fingers on the material, voluntarily apparent, highlights the vivacity of the modeling whose lines recall the animal's sculptor Rembrandt Bugatti.
Thanks to his talent and the perfect complicity he has with his founders, an accomplished practitioner, José-Maria DAVID has been working since the beginning of his career to bring to life magnificent bronze animals, cast in two foundries located in Ile-de-France, at the gates of Paris, the Landowski smelter at Bagnolet, and the Chapon foundry at Bobigny. "My ambition, he explained, is to produce something timeless, in a material that is stronger than stone or bronze."
His work now brings together no less than 400 sculptures. All testify to the strength of the sculptor's gesture, preserved in its raw state on the model and revealing the spontaneity and authenticity that preside over their elaboration. This style, like no other, always arouses the passion of fans. Some pieces reach records in international public sales, such as this "Cheetah in the race ", auctioned 250,000 € in August 2010 in an auction in Deauville.
In love with his art, lead by the strength of his creation, José-Maria David sums up his artistic universe: "There is the idea, the way, the technique. I cannot do anything else. I am unable to do anything that I do not like; I am a man of passion."
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