Highlights from Corpus – Three Millennia of the Human Body

E xploring enduring themes of beauty, love, life and death through the body as subject, Corpus – Three Millennia of the Human Body brings together a mega-lineup of 50 artworks spanning antiquity to the contemporary.

The exhibit moves from idealised representations exemplified by the classical tradition to the modernist preoccupation with the fragmented and disintegrated body. From there it’s on to the postmodern expansion of sculpture into a range of environmental and futuristic forms. Through it all, the body is the space through which we come to see and understand our own nature.

The exhibition is on view until 27 March, 2025, at Sotheby’s new Maison in Hong Kong. Below are some of the most striking pieces.

The first life-size reclining figure and the greatest work of Henry Moore’s highly acclaimed career, Reclining Figure: Festival solidified the artist’s defining role in the history of British art.

Commissioned for the landmark Festival of Britain in 1951, Reclining Figure: Festival captivated audiences with its radical definition of space and interpretation of the human figure, transforming the concept of Modern sculpture.

The festivities were to take place on the newly redesigned London South Bank and mark the centenary of the 1851 Great Exhibition, buoying the national mood by promoting the spirit of British resilience and creativity after years of post-war austerity. At the heart of it was the unveiling of Moore's sculptural masterpiece. Evolving from Moore’s wartime Shelter Drawings, the Reclining Figure: Festival expressed modernity and humanity, consoling a nation still scarred by the recent past.

For Moore, it was also a personal breakthrough, marking the first time in which he had succeeded in making form and space sculpturally inseparable. Remarkably, every phase of the execution of the sculpture was captured in a BBC documentary, the first of a living artist ever made in Britain. The camera captured the elegant bronze curves and lissome fluidity of Moore’s creation, not only affirming Moore's status in the artistic canon, but also giving rise to a new genre of filmmaking.

This wood carving is a mesmerising and astonishing sculpture of a hampotong figure made in Central Borneo by the Proto-Dayak peoples.

The Dayak peoples – a generalised term for the indigenous tribes of Borneo and often referred to as Kayanic – include Pre-Austronesian peoples who have lived on Borneo for as long as 40,000 years and Austronesian peoples, or proto-Dayaks, who appear to have migrated to Borneo as early as 4000 years ago.

Coming from a centuries-old ceremonial tradition linked to the cult of the dead in the centre of the island of Borneo, these large, anthropomorphic figures were the guardians of the dead. These figures are believed to protect the village against epidemics and evil spirits, as well as marking sacred areas or sanctuaries in connection to mortuary practices, acting as mediaries between the world of the living and the world of the spirits. Considered to be aligned with the masculine, warrior archetype, hampatong could also be guardians placed in front of the long communal houses to protect the community against epidemics and malign entities.

Torse nu dans les nuages is a key painting from the early Surrealist period of Belgian painter René Magritte. It was first exhibited in 1948 in Magritte's inaugural solo show at Copley Galleries in Los Angeles, and subsequently acquired by the Swiss-American artist and collector Amalia de Schulthess from Esther Robles Gallery – remaining in her collection for more than seven decades.

Magritte’s most important contribution to the canon of modern art is widely considered to be the corpus of disruptive Surrealist artworks he created from the late 1920s and throughout the 1930s, and following the Second World War through until the 1960s. Magritte’s distinctive figurative style made him not only a pillar of the Surrealist movement but an abiding inspiration for artists of the 20th and 21st centuries.

In Torse nu dans les nuages, a nude female torso stands like a maquette atop an artist’s studio table with a black cloth backdrop, resembling a theatrical stage. Floating clouds – a favorite motif of Magritte – part to reveal a cerulean blue seascape of the sky meeting the ocean embodied in the nude torso of a young woman.

The fragmented female torso was one of Magritte's core motifs, appearing in a range of compositions as early as 1932. Magritte had acquired a plaster cast of a nude torso, most likely from Maison Berger, an art supplies shop owned by his sister-in-law in Brussels. Rather unusually, the torso had been cast from life rather than a classical sculpture. Concurrently, Magritte researched ancient Greco-Roman statues of fragmented female nudes, as well as enlisting his wife and muse Georgette Berger as a life model for several paintings.

This surreal clash of real life, classical antiquity and anatomical exactitude probed the fine line between the alluring and alarming – transforming the everyday into the unforgettable dream of Torse nu dans les nuages.

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“It’s intriguing to me to connect the divine and the human, the religious and the profane,” declared the Belgian sculptor Berlinde De Bruyckere in an interview in 2023. Born in 1964 and based in Ghent, one of the key centres of the Northern Renaissance, De Bruyckere draws on the legacies of the Flemish Old Masters, religious iconography as well as mythology and folklore.

A preoccupation with the twin forces of life and death are central to De Bruyckere’s practice. Her father was a butcher and she was raised in a strict Catholic institution.

In Jelle Luipaard, flayed skin sculpted from wax hangs from an iron beam attached to the wall. Like many of De Bruyckere’s works, Jelle Luipaard (or “Yellow Leopard”) was named after De Bruyckere’s model, as a way of incorporating a very human character or mentality into the work. It speaks of the vulnerability of man and the fragility of his earthly shell.

When the work was unveiled in 2004 at the artist’s first show in Zurich, Christ’s suffering also echoed the images of the ongoing war in Afghanistan, of soldiers’ bodies hanged under bridges, of atrocities still being committed 2000 years after the crucifixion.

It is also important to remember that the Passion, or the “suffering” of Christ, was also the fulfilment of his passage on earth, and over 2,000 years the crucifixion has become a potent symbol of victory over death, of the irredeemable bond between humanity and God. Today, millions around the world wear a cross around their necks as a powerful symbol of hope in the future.

Depicting the ancient Egyptian fertility god Min, this fragmented granodiorite head is extremely rare for its life-size proportions.

Min is one of the oldest attested gods in the Egyptian pantheon, and perhaps according to Herodotos, who identified him as Pan, the most ancient deity of them all. Believed to be a god of fertility and fecundity, with close ties to the royal lineages, Min was originally associated with agricultural fertility rites.

Given the pharaoh's power being heavily tied to agricultural success, the connection between Min and kingship is a natural kinship. The beautifully sculpted expression of the granite has been systematically destroyed, sustaining significant damage. The chisel marks on the face and its removal from the wider standing sculpture suggest religiously motivated iconoclasm.

Despite this, the rich deepness of the black granite and delicately sloping eye with a cosmetic eyebrow retains a profound majesty and magnanimity.

With a disconcerting realism in the modelling of the powerful pectoral muscles and contours of the thighs visible beneath a diaphanous sampot, this important sandstone torso fragment dates to the Pre-Angkor Period in the 7th or 8th century.

Its clothing folds are delineated by faintly incised lines, with a long central sash hanging down between the legs. The statuary of the Khmer Empire was essentially religious in nature, whether Buddhist or Brahmanical. The images were embodiments of the divine, and as such, they were expressions of ideal beauty.

International trade brought South Asian Hindu and Buddhist traditions to mainland Southeast Asia from India. Although the links to Indian artistic traditions are clear, even the earliest Pre-Angkorian sculpture is distinctly Southeast Asian in style. The “Classical decorum” of Gupta sculpture is replaced with a different physiognomy, figures are noticeably more naturalistic and dynamic in style.

展售会

Corpus —— 身·物·三千年

2025年2月15日–3月27日 | 香港