Felicia Leimer only began to study sculpture when she was in her mid-forties.
She was born in Warsaw, Poland, but emigrated to Sao Paolo, Brazil in 1927. There she trained with the sculptor Victor Brecheret.
For the first decade of her career, Leimer made figurative sculpture, somewhat similar to Henry Moore's work. There are single figures, and mothers with children. The torsos and interlocking limbs in some of these sculptures began to be honed down to such an extent that they became almost abstract arrangements, and by 1958 Leimer had abandoned figuration Nevertheless, she retained an organic sense of form that can be seen in the flowing, curved lines of some of her pieces, while others developed from her knowledge of church architecture and symbolism, the forms of arches and crosses. Leimer also began to work on a much larger scale, creating pieces that the viewer could walk through.
Although she is little known in Britain, the Tate Collection houses Leimer's bronze sculpture Composition (1962); her art has been much admired and exhibited in her adopted country-She is represented internationally in collections including the Hermitage, St Petersburg and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. She was awarded the Rio de Janeiro Museum of Modern Art's prize at the 1955 Sao Paolo Biennal, and the award for best Brazilian sculptor in the Biennal eight years later There is now a museum devoted to her in Sao Paolo, where her work can be seen lining the walkways of a sculpture garden, and silhouetted against the sky. |
