About Thalia, Bronze Head on the 7th floor of the Landmark, reference to Catalog “George Petrides: Recent Work 2019-2021”

For My Friends at Tiffany’s Landmark:

I’m hoping you can see the catalog that has a blue cover with a photo of a clay head. That is the predecessor of your piece! That is the clay head I made by hand, then fired in a kiln, and at the time of the photo she was heading to a Greek foundry to be cast in bronze. Through Peter Marino’s recommendation and acceptance by Tiffany executives - all of whom I thank from the bottom of my heart - she found her way to your 7th floor.

Let me go back in time...as you can see in the catalog, I did smaller figures, palm sized heads, lifesize heads of family. In 2021, I decided to do two over lifesize heads, male and female. Being a lover of sculptural masterworks, I chose a head by Auguste Rodin from The Burghers of Calais as a starting point for the male. And Thalia, a marble Roman copy of an earlier Greek sculpture, at the Vatican Museums, for the female. 

So, I started blocking out the female head in clay, on a wooden armature, and it transformed itself - without my conscious effort. The head started looking like my Mother in a black/white photograph from Athens around 1950, after the Nazi Occupation and Greek Civil War, when she was about age 20.  You can see me working on her on page 16 of the catalog. That bust kept evolving, getting larger in size and becoming one of six Hellenic Heads, an exhibition traveling around the world to 8 cities, now at the National Hellenic Museum, Chicago, July 21 to December 10, 2023. More here: https://linktr.ee/hellenic.heads and general info here: https://linktr.ee/petrides.art

The head without the body is just as or more powerful! It conveys expressions of my Mother from the 70 year old photograph: pensive and beautiful. And my great love for her. And that is what you have on your 7th floor.