Oviri

Oviri is an 1894 ceramic sculpture by the French artist Paul Gauguin. In Tahitian mythology, Oviri was the goddess of mourning and is shown with long pale hair and wild eyes. It was exhibited at the 1906 Salon d’Automne where it influenced Pablo Picasso.

About Oviri in brief

Oviri is an 1894 ceramic sculpture by the French artist Paul Gauguin. In Tahitian mythology, Oviri was the goddess of mourning and is shown with long pale hair and wild eyes, smothering a wolf with her feet while clutching a cub in her arms. The original cast is in the Musée d’Orsay. It was exhibited at the 1906 Salon d’Automne where it influenced Pablo Picasso, who based one of the figures in Les Demoiselles d’Avignon on it. A number of bronzes were produced, including the cast by Fermain Singer-Polignation at Atuona, reaching 29ft tall and 29ft wide. The third version was kept by the artist’s son, Léon, who made the casts in plaster and erected them on his grave in 1973. One of the three casts is no longer extant and now belongs to Daniel Monididal Maurice Denis-Germain-Laye in Saint-Lay-Etienne, France. The fourth and final cast was made by Gustave Fayet and erected in 1973 to reach 29ft long or blonde or blonde hair, reaching long or grey hair, and reaching long blonde hair. The fifth and final version was made in plaster with the finish of wood and erected at the Félix-Polissier Gallery in Paris, reaching a height of 20ft tall. It is the only surviving cast of Oviri from the 1894-1905 period, and is now on display at the Musées de Beaux-Arts de Lausanne in Switzerland.

It has been described as an epithet to reinforce his self-image as a “civilised savage”. Other possible influences include preserved skulls from the Marquesas Islands, figures found at Borobudur, and a 9th-century Mahayana Buddhist temple in central Java, and Assyrian relief of a “master of animals” type, and Majapahit mummies. There are only three other surviving comments of his on the figure: he described the figure as a strange and cruel enigma on an 1895 presentation mount of two impressions of a woodcut for Stéphane Mallarmé; he referred to it as La Tueuse in an 1897 letter to Ambroise Vollard; and he appended an inscription referencing Honoré de Balzac’s novel Séraphîta in a c. 1899 drawing. His sales of the casts were not successful, and at a low financial and personal ebb he asked for one to be placed on his deathbed. One was a plaster casts, which suggest that they were taken from a prior undocumented wood carving from prior to the prior prior to his death in 1891. The other was a wood carving in plaster, with the surface of wood, with a finish of grey-partemented wood in March 1973 and erected to reach the height of 29ft.