This exhibition focuses on Dimitri Hadzi’s intimately scaled sculptures – a rarely seen aspect of his work. Cast in silver or bronze (some gold plated), these miniature sculptures (from barely 3 inches to 12 inches high) retain a commanding sense of presence and identity, their diminutive scale notwithstanding. Only a few artists of our time – Calder, Giacometti, Moore among them – shared Hadzi’s facility with large and small scale, moving effortlessly between the two.
Hadzi’s sculpture reconciles the competing claims of figuration and abstraction; expressionism and emotional restraint; intimate scale and monumentality; delicacy and mass. His comprehensive knowledge of ancient cultures and Greco-Roman art led to the development of a personal lexicon of forms that reflect the past and simultaneously contribute to the evolution of 20th century sculpture.
Born in New York City on March 21, 1921, Hadzi graduated from Cooper Union in 1950 and received a Fulbright Fellowship in the same year. After studying sculpture in Greece, he moved to Rome under the GI Bill where he lived for twenty-five years. Hadzi returned to the U.S. where he taught at Harvard University for fourteen years. He continued to create sculpture until his death in 2006.
Hadzi is included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; The Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC; and The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Receiving over twenty sculpture commissions during his lifetime, Hadzi’s work appears in public squares, concert halls, federal and private plazas, and universities throughout the world.
