Bruno Gironcoli, “Sculpture”

Strangeness is no stranger to art, but the oeuvre of Austrian artist Bruno Gironcoli (1936–2010) certainly took eccentricity to the max. His baroquely futurist sculptures combined organic elements and machine-like parts into objects that resembled extraterrestrial vehicles arriving from space. Trained as a metalsmith, Gironcoli turned to sculpture in the early ‘60s during a sojourn in Paris where he became acquainted with Alberto Giacometti. He was particularly taken with latter’s early efforts—pieces like The Palace at 4 a.m. in which spindly forms are assembled on a platform like actors on a stage. Taking the idea and running with it, Gironcoli heaped towering piles of stuff, both representational (fauna, fetuses, brooms, toilets) and not (borrowings from Jean Arp, Yves Tanguy and Joan Miró) onto podiums, creating, as it were, altars to chaos. Like other Austrians of his generation, Gironcoli was reacting to the horrors of Nazism through works that evoked a world pulling itself together after coming apart at the seams.