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It is the promise of art as a universal language that has motivated Cecilia Rodhe throughout her career as a sculptor and that informs every piece she has ever created.
Like so many of the great sculptors of the past, she works with elemental themes and forms, which she imbues with a sense that is at once timeless and very much in the now. All of her sculptures express the dichotomy of strength and fragility that is at the very center of what it is to be human, and that is also intrinsic to the nature of stone, her primary medium, and the one in which she began her career nearly twenty years ago.
At the time, her life was the epitome of glamour. A former Miss Sweden and a leading international model photographed by some of the world’s premier photographers, she was married to French tennis star Yannick Noah and living in New York with their two children when she decided to become a sculptor and began her training at the New School, continuing it at the Ecole de Beaux Arts in Paris, where she moved and lived for the next dozen years. In Paris she also studied with the prominent French sculptors Zorko and Xavier Dambrine, eventually getting her own atelier in Belleville. And prior to her return to New York, in 1998, she worked in Senegal with Mustapha Dime and Ousman Sow, developing the strong interest in African culture and civilization whose influence can be seen so clearly not only in her sculpture but in her frequent and energetic work for humanitarian causes throughout the world.
During her long and highly successful career, Cecilia work’s has been exhibited at the United Nations in both New York and Geneva, and in galleries in New York, Paris and Stockholm. She has also received numerous important private and public commissions, the most recent of which was for “In Oneness”, a massive bronze on permanent display in Atlantic City, New Jersey. If her art has always been strongly influenced by her personal environment, expressing everything that defines her as a woman and as a person, its resonance is only heightened in today’s world where hope and love and artistic beauty seem so anodyne, such necessary antidotes to everything that is happening around us.
http://www.ceciliarodhe.com/
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