The Savior of Europe Sculpture
Very stylized head, no portrait. Eyes detached from the face. Astonishment, amazement and pain, all exacerbated by a tear that lightly levitates in space. Ears that make up a stylized cross, a symbol of Christianity. Silent pain. Faded pain, impossible to express by open mouth, entwined by an immaterial pyramidal structure. An immense void.
This is what you see and feel when you arrive in front of the third statue: The Savior of Europe Sculpture. Created in 2019 by a group of students led by painter, sculptor, illustrator, and university professor Jirků, the sculpture appears to be from another world. The impressing head conveys at the same time energy, aggressivity, frustration, but also bewilderment regarding the future of Europe. The only thing that seems certain here is the reference to Christianity, the return to one of the founding values of the European Union: “In Christianity our arts developed; the laws of Europe were – until recently – rooted in Christianity”, said Thomas Stearns Eliot, Nobel laureate in Literature in 1948. Similar to the European space, the region of the Plopiș Mountains is a multiethnic and multidenominational place. And the display of a statue like The Savior of Europe in this space only but confirms the fact that the people here cherish diversity, spiritual and cultural values.
It is a real honor to display inside the Huta Slavia complex sculptures created by one of the greatest contemporary artists in the Czech Republic, university professor Boris Jirků. Former professor at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague, Boris Jirků currently teaches figural drawing and painting at the Ladislav Sutnar Faculty of Design and Art at the University of West Bohemia in Pilsen. At the same time, he is a doctoral and master supervisor – classical media (figurative drawing, graphics, illustration, painting, sculpture) at the Faculty of Fine Arts at the Academy of Arts in Banská Bystrica. He is the organizer of the FIGURAMA exhibition, which presents works of students from 15 universities in Europe and the US. He devotes himself to free drawing, painting, graphics, illustration, fine art in wood and metal, and to artistic creations in architecture. He participated in dozens of exhibitions in Czechia and abroad. In 2019, he took part in a sculpture workshop in the Huta Slavia complex, where, together with his students, he created the Savior of Europe Statue.