Peter Mandl was born in Czechoslovakia, today The Czech Republic, in Prague the year of 1947. As a result of the effects of the Prague spring, Peter escaped to Sweden in 1968 as a political refugee. He now enjoys his life in Påarp, situated beautifully on the west coast of Sweden in the outskirts of Halmstad with his wife Gunilla. They have two children and six grandchildren.

 

Peter continues his creative work from his home studio. Movements reminiscent of the elements, and shapes found in nature, the human body, are frozen still yet forever moving, telling a story, pleasing the eye, feeding the mind, and caressing the soul. His elegant, creative and elaborative sculptures can be seen both in public and private art collections all over the world. 

 

In the late  '70s, Peter worked exclusively with bronze but returned to glass at the beginning of the '90s. Today he works both with glass and bronze. He is represented at the National Museum in Stockholm.

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The Sculptor Peter Mandl

by Viveka Bosson, art critic and daughter of Erik Olsson

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Peter Mandl's sculptures seem to be shaped by the winds and waves of the sea; of eddies and currents, sun globes, rocks and the moving forms of rounded dunes he is surrounded by as a strong presence just outside the studio in Påarp. The element of water Mandl had in a way already had a close relationship with. In Prague, his artistic roots had grown out of the glass. In the glass he could express all the phases of the ancient Greeks' primordial element, the water which, according to the pre-Socratic philosopher Thales, could assume all structures from solid to liquid matter and gases. the glass was shaped into ice crystals and mineral lights, soft rhythms of waves and rising cloud formations.

 

Today it is the sea winds that sweep over the bridge. There is something of Bergson's dynamic concept of time in these sculptures, a "now flow" in constant change, filled with life and force. They are mythic archetypes that balance between the rigid architectural and the flowing movement-charged never "finished", always on the way to a new idlency: Daialos, the architect of the labyrinth in Crete who managed to float through space all the way to Sardinia, at flvkt from his own creation and the wonder Minotauros, has grown from Mandl's hand into a figure with golden wings, itself a labyrinth, eaten away by the sea's saltiness and winds. The same winds transform Orpheus into a flow of musical rhythms. This is how these eternally current figures from Greek mythology are renewed, often women with tragic fates, threatened by unknown forces, by death rays aimed at the head or by being stung like a "mother of pains" Penelope's far-seeing gaze moves scouting towards the ocean horizon for Odysseus' ship, itself motionless with legs firmly ensnared in their own nets, ever waiting. A woman is sculpted into a Vindil - or perhaps it is the wind that conjures up a female figure. The play of the waves transforms into Naiads Melpomenes and Klio's tresses fly undulating through space.

 

The element of fire also flows through some of Mandl's figures. the flames of passion, consuming or warming. Hephaestus - the smith's - constructive fire, Prometheus' gift to mankind, the origin of all culture. These austere architectural figures, shaped and cast with intuition and the feeling of a sure hand, do they perhaps get their strange inner life from this flowing flow of sea winds, water and dancing flames in constant metamorphosis, from this play of contrasts and enigmatic opposites?

 

Viveka Bosson March 1997

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