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Danish Sculptor Eli Benveniste

By Morten Søndergaard, 2021

Eli Benveniste’s work and life are characterized by a broad personal perspective and a fundamental courage to simultaneously move geographically and artistically, while employing various materials.

She is self-taught and a member of the Danish artist group Koloristerne. She lives in Italy, in the artist town of Pietrasanta in Tuscany and is married to the sculptor Jørgen Haugen Sørensen with whom she has shared a large part of her life and work.

When she was very young, she embarked on an exploratory life journey from which she has never returned. Initially, it took her to Spain, Barcelona and then to Italy and Portugal; but first and foremost, she has embarked on a journey searching for what art is and what art may be. She has continuously expressed herself in clay, this ancient and also very complaisant material.

Eli Benveniste has been inspired by cave paintings and also the twisted bodies of the bog creatures which later would appear floating, suspended from the galleries’ ceilings. In her work we find a dense web of widely interwoven time-layers emerging on top of each other and thus creating new patterns. Different times dissolve and mix and create new images. It may seem like a dissociation from contemporary art but the present and the past appear everywhere in Benveniste’s work. It is vital to her to reflect courage and power, a desire to change things, to enchant and re-model the world – all themes that have pervaded her art right from the outset.

Her choice of materials reflects great curiosity and she expresses herself with equal ease in clay, bronze, glass, resin and rubber. Tradition is also important to Eli Benveniste, and in recent work she has used the foot as motif. Here we find a twisted human body and the foot becomes a pars pro toto and a humorous and grotesque image of existence.

Recently, she has created a series of portrait busts where she demonstrates her ability to move easily between the abstract and the figurative. It is constantly the human being with all its madness and grotesque manifestations that works as a driver for her motif engine and inspiration.

Born Copenhagen 4 April 1961

Debut at Veksølund May 1988

Member of Koloristerne since January 1995

Website: elibenveniste.com

Currently Eli Benveniste is working on a series called Feet: 

"Why Feet?

I began doing them already in Portugal last summer - long before we knew anything about the corona virus and the consequences we all would have to deal with.

A work process often begins by with the circumstances we find ourselves in. In this case I had to do smaller sculptures, if I wanted to work in my newly restored studio in Portugal; sizes which later could be transported back to Italy in our car. But I also Liked the idea of looking closely into a specific detail of the body.

But why feet exactly?

To me a foot is a kind of sculpture in itself, it has this particular triangular form, similar to the rhythm a conductor draws in the air, with his beat.

A form who closes upon itself in a very natural way. I discovered that they could be turned upside down, stand, lay and be distorted in every way and be expressive even with a few touches.

I started with a smaller foot, just the foot itself with no ankle. It became the foot of the Boor bog man or the Tollund man, that was found in bog land after more than 2000 years. Then I did "Blockhead Hans" foot - from the story of H.C. Andersen, a joyful peasant’s foot and after that, the small delicate foot of a Japanese lady having an orgasm, as I had seen on the Japanese prints we have in our bedroom in Portugal. Always the same clenched feet like a fist, so well expressed and not to be misunderstood.

A new piece turned out to be a refugee’s foot; a foot that had walked thousands of miles, tired and hardened and marked by the many steps taken under heavy burdens.

Back in Italy the series evolved in a more imaginative direction. Apparently, it was not necessary to make a whole body, let alone a face, to express a condition or situation, it could all be contained in there, abstract and yet recognizable at the same time.

I squeezed the clay so it took shape from my hands and turned into a kind of a tree, which were followed by some more optimistic and playful feet. Lately I am making ballet feet. As they can’t stand on their own tip toe, I had to make the better half - and they became a pair - an etude.

The fact they were a pair, suggested some pretty wild compositions and sculpturally that's where it started to get really interesting, because something new, which I hadn’t expected, came up due to pure necessity. And I haven’t finished yet.