Bronze

89.7 x 67 x 65 cm

Untitled 3 (Bronze Bodybuilders) is a sculpture from David Altmejd’s The Bodybuilders series, featuring a life-size human figure covered in disfigured hands and their imprints into its form. As the plaster slab that the sculpture stands upon sees its material being dug into by the movement of hands, one can track the overall movement of these hands upwards such that the hands presented at the front of the sculpture’s figure appear to be building and moulding the shape of a man from the plaster material. Thus, David Altmejd highlights a sense of power in making the subject of the sculpture its own creator, further emphasised by the hands becoming the face of the bodybuilder. Metaphorically, as the material carries a history relating to its use in classical European sculpture, the sculpture also speaks to the idea of constructing oneself out of one’s own memories, offering a critical look at our image of the European man in the art history canon.