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Born in 1939, by the age of four Maurice Blik was face
to face with the questions and choices that philosophers, artists and
religions have left unanswered. He was taken, with his family,
from their home in Amsterdam, to Belsen concentration camp, and finally
liberted by the Russian Cossacks in 1945 whilst on a train on his way
to execution. He survived with his mother and sister and came to live
in England after WWII, in 1945. The ability to come
to terms with this experience and to confront the face of humanity that
he had witnessed, stayed silent in his life for some forty years. It
finally found a voice in the passionate and exquisite sculpture which
began to emerge in the late 1980s. Blik began by
making a series of horses' heads. These noble and benevolent creatures
posses an energy and a life force that seem just barely harnessed long
enough to take their shape in the clay itself. He then
progressed on to his figurative work - sometimes inspiring and
sometimes frightening in its intensity. These pieces move from the
heavy, amorphous, incomprehensible mass of primal clay, towards the
searing beauty of Blik's exquisitely modelled human features. The
irrepressible joy of life and the destructive, inpenetrable shadow of
existence, are held together in a struggling unity. Blik
has had an extensive career in Art Education, teaching at all levels
from Primary to Post Graduate. In the 1980s he began to develop his own
artwork and in 1991 gave up teaching to work full time on sculpture. He
has a post-graduate Art Teacher's Certificate with Distinction from
London University. In 1996 he was elected President of the Royal
Society of British Sculptors and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of
Arts. Maurice Blik works in the UK and USA where
he was awarded residency by the US Government as 'a person of
extraordinary artistic ability'. |
