reclining figure
The biggest impact of seeing the exhibition of Fritz Wotruba at the sculpture museum Beelden aan Zee in Scheveningen was a new appreciation of one of his works not present: his 'Reclining Figure' on the Westersingel in Rotterdam.
Part of an extensive series - or really a lifelong quest - of progressively more abstracted human figures, this work somehow manages to strike a perfect balance, creating a curvaceous human figure out of cubes and rectangles. Instead of the fragmentary, multi-perspective vision of cubism, this is about as elementary and 'purely' geometrical as art can get and still be figurative.
Another reason why specifically this work appears so striking might by that sculptures like these are best seen in a city context: a white reclining figure on the sidewalk, basking in the sun, lazily observing the traffic passing by...
Or in the words of Wotruba: "I dream of a sculpture in which landscape, architecture and city are one! It might be a city like Marseilles, a city steaming with heat which suddenly transmogrifies. It becomes an immense piece of sculpture, a gigantic figure, made up of white blocks and segmented by flat, horizontal terraces arranged in a bare and motionless landscape."