ART STOP 6

Sorel Etrog

Kabuki, 1975

Sadko, 1975

Steel and acrylic paint

Dimensions: approximately 4 meters high

Location: Bow Valley Square

Sorel Etrog was born in 1933 Jassy, Romania, and passed away in 2014 in Toronto, Canada.  He received his artistic training at the Institute of Painting and Sculpture, Tel Aviv (1950); and at the Brooklyn Museum of Art (1958). Sorel Etrog was accepted into the Order of Canada in 1994 and was made a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government in 1996. He was best known for his abstracted figurative sculpture, and the statue he created for the Canadian Film Award in 1968 is recognizable to many Canadians as the Genie.

Kabuki and Sadko are two huge, colourful sculptures that illustrate the affinity between the mechanical and organic worlds. Sadko, the vivid red piece, was inspired by a dancer from the Japanese Sadko ballet. The bright yellow figure, Kabuki, portrays a Japanese Kabuki dancer. Their design, however, stems from the artist's fascination with a display of nuts and bolts he saw in a Canadian Tire store.

Sorel Etrog’s pieces were created both for the private and public sectors around the world: Montréal’s Expo 67; the Los Angeles County Museum; and the Olympic Parc in Seoul, Korea, to name a few. His work resides in a number of permanent public collections including the Tate Museum in London; the Museum of Modern Art and the Solomon Guggenheim in New York; the Kunstmuseum in Basel; Musée National d’Art Moderne in Paris; the Tel Aviv Museum; the Art Gallery of Ontario; and the National Gallery of Canada, to name a few.