Stone Cross

Of course, there is nothing humiliating and petty about the landscape sculpture. It’s quite the contrary: the outstanding examples of this genre acquire the status of the museum masterpieces, decorate cities and spaces around palaces. In our terrains, such splendour was associated for a too long time with such masterpieces as The Girl with an Oar and The Pioneer-Bugler which with broken off extremities and ghostly contours still frighten careless holidaymakers in the most unfrequented corners of neglected green areas.

But at present, the normal landscape sculpture reverts to us with the human (or any else) and attractive face. The sculptor Oleksandr Smyrnov proves with the help of his works that the professional art must occupy a worthy place both in public parks and private farmsteads, moving ‘oars’ and terrible dwarfs covered with drawings to a dump. His works resemble the aristocratic remains of the architectural elements of Kyivan Rus or the Ukrainian baroque’s epoch, but with the modern understanding of the shape.

There are witty stone crosses, bizarre lions with curled tails, fantastic birds, and so on. The taste and might are felt in every work. Like many of his colleagues, Smyrnov works with different materials and formats, that’s why the artist doesn’t confine himself to monumental fruits. His satiric compositions-allegories in plaster, small bronze abstract and exquisite forms or wooden sculpture may serve as decorations of our life landscape or, at least, a diminutive garden with bonsai on your table.

Autor: Mariana Prut