Pieter Obels
"My sculptures come about spontaneously, as the result of improvisation."
Pieter Obels is a master of Corten steel.is works convey light and grace as he bends the steel into extraordinarily delicate and winding shapes. The two artistic worlds couldn’t be further apart - as if we were watching the yin and yang of the same material. In spite of the fact that steel is generally considered rough and austere, Obels’ sculptures are able to express all of the intrinsic possibilities of the material. When one wonders at Pieter Obels’ figures of steel and the curves he manages to give his material, feelings of strength and flow arise.
Through a clever interplay of rigidity and dynamism, Obels’ work occupies a space deftly lingering between a sense of weight and weightlessness. His sculptures completely confound our perceptions of how a steel sculpture should look like and behave. Obels’ aim is to create totally organic forms with an extreme yet somehow innate sense of plasticity. This sense of a natural rhythm makes his sculptures sit with a total oneness in any natural surrounding.
Working alone without assistants, Obels has permitted this aspect to dominate his works while also emphasizing the elegant quality that they possess. Although totally contemporary, there is a strong wistfulness for a bygone age which favoured poetry over power and nature over industrial noise. The sense of a precarious balance which many of his works have, play beautifully with the apparent contradiction inherent in his material.