‘I see the head as a sort of drawing. You know that some sculptors make drawings, I make heads.’


Altmejd’s sculpted heads provoke that shiver of the uncanny which lifelike sculpture tends to induce, but skilfully realistic features are interspersed with crude expressionism, gobbets of raw matter or hanks of fur. They have a hallucinatory quality – vivid and startling. One head might sprout another, inverted, so that they share a single pair of eyes. In other works the faces are gone, as if they have been scooped out, but their gaping wounds reveal cavities of dazzling crystal or the inside of a hollowed-out fruit, as if to collapse the categories of animal, vegetable and mineral. There is an immediate appeal to the senses in the artist’s juxtaposition of finely-wrought realism with crude gesture; the proximity of crystals and delicate gold chains with fur and abject matter suggesting ever-present decay.

From the start of his career, Altmejd has been preoccupied with sculpture’s potential to ‘create energy’. The werewolf, with its mythical power of transformation from human to beast, has been a favourite subject since 2000, and symbolizes those oppositions – human and animal, good and evil, life and death, beauty and abjection – which fascinate the artist and fuel his imagination. Altmejd’s work is a unique and heady mix of science, magic, science fiction and gothic romanticism, a post-apocalyptic vision which is at the same time essentially optimistic, containing as it always does the potential for regeneration, evolution and invention.

Altmejd described himself early in his career as a ‘process artist’. His works not only reveal the process of their making but suggest that those processes have simply been paused in their unfolding.

Several families of monumental figures which Altmejd has been making since 2009, first in plaster and later bronze, seem to be engaged in their own making or unmaking, like the Bodybuilders which sprout hands that clutch and mould the very substance of their bodies. They appear to use material from the gallery’s very walls to give form to their bodies, as in the case of the Architects, and by dragging their own matter upwards they create angelic wings, in the case of the Watchers.

Altmejd demotes himself from sole author to a kind of collaborator: ‘I’m just helping it to stay alive’, he has explained. 'The goal is for it ‘to build itself and create its own intelligence […] I like the feeling that I’m losing control and I’m not the one making the choices […] I always hope that my work is going to be bigger than me, that it will outgrow me.’

Altmejd’s monochrome relief panels call our attention to the plaster-like material and the actions wrought on it − where it has fallen in wet splats, where a brittle, chalky surface is scratched or fractured, where hands have gouged and clawed. In Le Saut (2017), the inchoate plaster seems to bring forth an arm, stretching like Adam’s towards the finger of God in Michaelangelo’s Sistine ceiling for a life-giving spark. In Magic Loop (2017), regenerative energy is made visible in a machine-like system of constantly replicating hands and eggs. A surreal humour pervades the work as the titular ‘magic’ emerges as both a traditional ‘trick’, an egg withdrawn from behind the ear, and seductive play on the potential of the medium. In the lower right hand corner, the work reveals its own secrets as the hard plaster is neatly pulled back like a sheet of canvas to reveal further eggs; and so the loop continues.