Medardo Rosso

He also invited audiences to watch as he performed the role of “artist-labourer”, expanding the notion of a work of art to include the act of creation itself, and the circumstances of its reception.

Rosso’s rejection of the classical sculptural tradition, and his focus on light and atmospheric effects, has inevitably drawn comparison with the Impressionists, confirmed perhaps by his self-proclaimed “preoccupation with the impression, the intuition of life, and the neglect of matter”.

ideas central to Rosso: his undoing of form, his embrace of impermanence, his experimentation with materiality, his challenge to the very notion of sculpture as final and fixed