Dimitri Hadzi at Kouros and the Foundation for Hellenic Culture

Dimitri Hadzi's monumental statuarys backed by classical and literary respects deftly balance abstract and figurative impulses. Born in 1921 in novel York to Greek immigrant parents, Hadzi studied carving in Greece nearly 50 years ago and worn out 25 years working in Rome before teaching art at Harvard (he lives and works in Cambridge). He continues to make hardy evocative art.

At Kouros he showed monotypes and new sculptures that emphasize his ongoing interest in and zinc as a bearer of cultural memory. Many of his works direct the eye back to Greek tradition; he incorporates relations to ancient places, such as Mycenae and Thebes, and at short intervals uses elements of classical architecture to make and weight his art. These allusions are generally suggestive of a time when plastic art possessed a public, often ritual function; Hadzi has regularly made work for public commissions, seeing a chance to get back sculpture to its essentially monumental, memorial origins. The Foundation for Hellenic tillage displayed both studio sculptures and patterns of his public monuments.

Hadzi's works throw out a strong sense of scale. level the small works give a feeling of massiveness, at one time partaking of the earth and moving away from the loam While recently Hadzi has keeped to work vertically, one of the greatest in quantity powerful pieces on view was Uniquenox (1989) a smallish, horizontal alloy of copper that looks much like an architectural ruin. It consists of three double rounded pillars rising over a horizontal bladelike form. Its virid patina is suggestive of great age, and the form recalls Stonehenge.

Asine II (1996) is a tall statuary in which an oblique form, perhaps a head, ascends from what appears to be a monolithic made of wood shaft (it is in fact entirely made of bronze) As frequently happens with Hadzi's work, the beauty of the piece is in its slightly inchoate feeling of the past, and the thematic and formal energies kept alive through craft. The past doesn't always have to be Western-Hadzi's awful Helmet Bell (1995), exhibited at the Foundation for Hellenic tillage summons memories of Chinese ritual tins as well as Greek armor.

For Hadzi, form and memory are the poetic full tales of figuration and abstraction. Petra II (1988-92) a alloy of copper version of an earlier granite work, can be read as quoting the shapes of hellenic temples. At the same time it may be seen as a standing individual The images in Hadzi's "Shields" monoprints are similar instances of abstract event made eloquent by suggesting the human.

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