Sophie Verger

"As a young girl , visiting  places such as the Bourdelle studio, frequently going to the Louvre and encouraged by Etienne Martin at the School of Fine Arts brought me naturally to sculpture.

The animal theme can supply many ways to explore esthetic, symbolic, emotional and erotic ideas. My first rhinoceros form, unstable equilibriums, where each one has to take care of the other in order not to fall. They are sometimes depressed, their horns lowered, but they look at the sky with their young  riders, and these  young girls discover Eros. I went from rhinoceros to elephants, to hippopotamuses, playing with structures so that they look like their original animal forms, but not too much . I just look for the balance point where the animal exists in itself and this gives me its anatomical peculiarities to evoke a situation. 

Contemporary Art broke the codes and created a bridge between the public and the artist. My preoccupation concerns the representation of  forms, the expression of a set moment in time, the quality of the patina which gives life to the bronze, of the choice of clay with regard to the subject. It is rather simple in fact ... to question, to surprise and to create emotion.

If I manage to perform these “specifications”, that  it is worthwhile."

Sophie Verger