BOTH PORTORO

For over thirty years, Italian sculptor and designer Mauro Mori (b. 1965, Cremona, Italy) has built a cohesive body of work including sculptures both functional and non-functional, hand-carved in stone or wood, or molded in metal. The artist uses time-honored techniques to sculpt each of his pieces. His work draws inspiration from his extensive travels around the world as well as his interest in the natural environment and the timeless beauty of simple organic forms.

While he discovered his vocation when sculpting wood in the Seychelles island where he lives half of the year, Mori was trained as a traditional wood and stone artisan in his native Italy. The maturity of his work today reflects the artist’s ongoing research and explorations across mediums and sculpting techniques; from his earlier work hand-carved in wood and stone to his more recent pieces sculpted in metal or cast in bronze. Each of Mori's pieces is most often hand-molded by the artist himself in the material’s place of origin.

Mori’s sculptural, sensual, and textured silhouettes are informed by the very nature of their chosen material. His sensitivity to the medium's unrefined beauty and sensuality endows his work with a sense of appreciation for the material itself and its natural, original environment. The wood pieces are carved out of massive Albizia Rosa wood trunks sourced and sculpted by the artist in Seychelles, while the Carrara marble hand-picked by Mori in Northern Italy is carved in his studio in Milan.

From the traditional sculpture techniques of subtraction used by the artist for his wood and stone works to the painstaking form-shaping and hammering of his metal pieces, Mori never ceases to explore and further his craftsmanship expertise.

Today, his work belongs to significant collections around the world, both institutional and private, and has been the subject of numerous exhibitions in the US and in Europe.