Big animal (Bureaucrat 3.) (2019) Sculpture by Erno Toth

A story about sculpture:

I got the idea for this sculpture when I was getting planning permission for modifications to my house.
An important-looking official at the construction office sat thoughtfully behind the desk. No matter what I said, what I asked, what my logical arguments were, he just kept grinding and asking me for more and more documents. He behaved haughtily, superiorly, sometimes even arrogantly. As if he was everything and I was nothing. He thought of himself as a big animal and that he could do anything to others.
For a moment I felt like the little plastic man facing the monstrous dog, but mentally I was amused by the whole situation. Because I knew that in a moment I would run out of patience and I would tame him elegantly, with humor and charm. I don't let people jump over my head.
That's what happened. I left him with a stamped construction permit and a subject for this sculpture, Big Animal.

Important information:
Even if I state that there are 3-5 copies of a specific sculpture, each of them is actually an original. The technique of my work is atypical and I have to model every single piece of the same sculpture again and create a mold into which the bronze is then poured. Despite over 40 years of experience, even I cannot model any of the other variations of the same motif completely identically. There are minor differences between them, even though in principle it is the same work.
Sometimes it can happen that the work shown in the photo has already been sold in the meantime, and in the case of another order, I have to model this motif again from the beginning and have it cast into a new form. In this case, the time for sending the work is around 3 weeks, and it must be taken into account that this sculpture will differ in a few small details from the depicted work.
But the advantage is that, for the above reasons, the purchased work is unique, and a completely identical work can simply never exist.


About Erno:
His sculptures decorate squares, city streets, public buildings and exhibition halls not only in Hungary but also in Sweden, Finland, France, Austria, Great Britain, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Russia, Japan, USA, Canada and in Taiwan.
In Hungary, his works are represented in collections of all major galleries, such as the Hungarian National Gallery, the Mihály Munkács Museum in Békéscsaba, the Janos Tornyai Museum in Hódmezővásárhely, the Ottó Herman Museum in Miskolc, the Janus Pannonius Museum in Pécs and others.

In the world of Erno Toth, dream and fantasy never become separated from reality, the possible from the impossible, the good from the bad, the tragic from the funny, the face from the mask, or the beautiful from the ugly. In his pictures many figures swarm in colourful crowds, usually in a cheerfully optimistic mood, but he always depicts the reverse as well as the fair side of things.
The world of Ernő Tóth is a very consciously structured world with laws rather unlike those that govern reality. His world was not created in six days, and it has not three but a multitude of dimensions - the three dimensions of space are as tight as a mousehole compared to the dimensions of feeling, thinking, jokes, dreams, and imagination in the artist’s world.
His inspiration comes from many places but is concentrated in opera, theater, carnivals, hunting, food, wine, and, ultimately from the great master Chagall. We have not found any artist that comes close to his style. His work tends to bring a smile to everyone’s lips and brightens a room as soon as it is hung.

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