Written by Editorial Team• October 18, 2016• 1:57 PM• exhibition, news • One Comment

The good, the bad and the very ugly

’’highly entertaining and thought provoking exhibition’’

During this year’s annual ‘Somerset Art Weeks’, at Venue 195 Duddlestone – Mista Fig, a mixed media sculptor, created a gallery in the farm’s original cow-yard, offering ‘The good, the bad and the very ugly’, a retrospective from 35 years of creativity.

To mention a little about his earlier years, aged six, his grandfather offered him wood off-cuts. Mista Fig recalls being captivated, trying to ‘build a new world’. He continued creating from his imagination until, at 14, a teacher introduced him to the History of Art, giving him belief in his future chosen path.

mista-fig
Spending several enlightening years being led along a sculpture trail by Stuart Osbourne (who was guided by the sculptor Jacob Epstein), Fig studied the human figure and nature. A British Council Scholarship to the ‘Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts’, Poland, followed. Believing art chose him, Mista Fig explores ideas using traditional media such as clay, wood and stone, plus manipulating found objects.

Fijalkowski works alone and his pieces have a peculiarly lonely quality, a pathos that is attractive and effective in conveying his story. His training was a formative experience, not through the conventional “art school” system but a moulding and grooming by Epstein taught S. J. Osbourne for six years. Fijalkowski’s work may be seen as a progression of this tradition, but is marked out by its isolation stance and individuality.Helen Carey

Working in series’, for the SAW exhibition, a few sculptures from each were chosen. Enormous heads and life-size figures, from plaster and/or resin, adorned with mirror mosaic, dazzled in the sunlight. Bog Oak (fossilized wood) carved into tall angular figures, stood alongside bouncing fish on springs. Mixed media ‘Little people that have come down from the hills’, created much laughter. Visitors proclaimed it a ’’highly entertaining and thought provoking exhibition’’.

: Mista Fig in studio

: Bog Oak carvings, Plaster Panels, mirror mosaic figure “Birdee Boy”

: Figures from the series ‘Hookers and Lookers’

: Bog Oak carving “Jester in a short skirt” in front of Plaster Panels

: Bog Oak carved fish on springs, with some ‘Hookers and Lookers’ behind

: Figures from the series “Little people that have come down from the hills”

: Mirror mosaic sculpture, from the series “Headz” plus a carved Bog Oak head of a horse

Soon Mista Fig will continue with ‘The Untouchables’, small bejewelled figures under glass domes, plus, update his website.

Future plans are to experiment with, as yet, un-tried materials and create a permanent artistic environment for his sculpture.

Andru Fijalkowski’s work is an impressive combination of solidity and delicacy, where emotions, feelings, and ideals are cast in appropriate media. Fijalkowski sees himself as a narrator of fact, a reflector of the individual. In what has become a faceless society he proposes the figure, as the means of expressing the frustrated emotions, faults and mistakes and alien individual feels in the society in which we live – I concentrate on a subject which as a society we have suppressed – the individual.

Mista Fig Website

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