artist statement

For each week of the month of August, Alexander will present a text and image ‘bundle’ bringing together some of the interests that have guided his historical research and artistic work in recent times, principally in his PhD thesis The Concert of Parts: Origins and Revolutions of the Trophy and his ongoing sculptural series “Impotent the flow of years...” 


meet the artist

Alexander Cigana recently graduated from a PhD in Art History at the University of Sydney. His thesis “The Concert of Parts: Origins and Revolutions of the Trophy” traced the trophy motif from the tropaia of Archaic Greece through to the trophées of eighteenth-century France. His work as a visual artist, principally in sculpture, ceramics and drawing, is preoccupied with the same themes: violence and the decorative, violence and knowledge; ephemerality and monumentality, the body and the ways it comes together and apart; cheapness and preciousness, antiquity and modernity; festivity, competition, sacrifice, humiliation, and martyrdom…etc. In 2020 he was resident at the Cité internationale des arts in Paris as a recipient of the Terrence and Lynette Fern Fellowship at the Power Institute. While teaching the art of the Italian Renaissance at his alma mater, he has been developing a series of works inspired by the encounter between his thesis research and his experiences in Paris. Alexander is about relocate to Antwerp where he will begin a Masters in Sculpture at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts.