Portraits of Eli Benveniste by photographer Heine Pedersen

thrown into the world, 2024

Over the past year, I’ve been working on this series of ceramic reliefs, and sculptures. Each relief is modelled on nature’s terms, so to speak, letting the material come into its own.

The three ceramic reliefs from the series "Thrown into the World" (Archive Numbers 270, 271, and 272)

explore the beauty of chance, the strike of a moment in a movement, preventing the ego from interfering. 

Fossils in rubber, 2023

FEET, 2020

Why Feet? I began doing them already in Portugal last summer - long before we knew anything about the corona virus and the consequences we all would have to deal with.

A work process often begins by with the circumstances we find ourselves in. In this case I had to do smaller sculptures, if I wanted to work in my newly restored studio in Portugal; sizes which later could be transported back to Italy in our car. But I also Liked the idea of looking closely into a specific detail of the body.

But why feet exactly? To me a foot is a kind of sculpture in itself, it has this particular triangular form, similar to the rhythm a conductor draws in the air, with his beat.

A form who closes upon itself in a very natural way. I discovered that they could be turned upside down, stand, lay and be distorted in every way and be expressive even with a few touches. 

I started with a smaller foot, just the foot itself with no ankle. It became the foot of the Boor bog man or the Tollund man, that was found in bog land after more than 2000 years. Then I did "Blockhead Hans" foot - from the story of H.C. Andersen, a joyful peasant’s foot and after that, the small delicate foot of a Japanese lady having an orgasm, as I had seen on the Japanese prints we have in our bedroom in Portugal. Always the same clenched feet like a fist, so well expressed and not to be misunderstood.

A new piece turned out to be a refugee’s foot; a foot that had walked thousands of miles, tired and hardened and marked by the many steps taken under heavy burdens.

Back in Italy the series evolved in a more imaginative direction. Apparently, it was not necessary to make a whole body, let alone a face, to express a condition or situation, it could all be contained in there, abstract and yet recognizable at the same time.

I squeezed the clay so it took shape from my hands and turned into a kind of a tree, which were followed by some more optimistic and playful feet. Lately I am making ballet feet. As they can’t stand on their own tip toe, I had to make the better half - and they became a pair - an etude. 

The fact they were a pair, suggested some pretty wild compositions and sculpturally that's where it started to get really interesting, because something new, which I hadn’t expected, came up due to pure necessity. And I haven’t finished yet.

Eli Benveniste  2020

Thanks to all who gave me their time and also a bit of their soul; allowing me to meld their features into clay

Portraits of my friends, - 2021

The portraits were chosen at random, it was more a coincidence: friends from Pietrasanta who had some time to dedicate or friends visiting from abroad. No intention really, no ambition for anything specific except to watch and let my hands follow my eyes and sometimes vice versa, when my hands "saw more than my eyes could see at the moment".

Thanks to all who gave me their time and also a bit of their soul; allowing me to meld their features into clay.

1. Georg Victor, German sculptor, Pietrasanta, 2015

2. Peter Poulsen, Danish poet, 2015

3. Ron Mehlman, American sculptor, Pietrasanta, 2016

4. Alena Matejka, Czech stone and glass sculptor, March 2016

5. Lars Kærulf Møller, museum director, May, 2016

6. Caterina Belle, teacher, Verona, May 2017

7. Raffaello Bassotto, photographer, Verona, May 2017

8. Dino Raymond Hansen, Danish film producer, October 2017

9. Giovanni Meloni, Veronese painter, May 2018

10. Trine Ellitsgaard, contemporary textile artist, June 2018

11. Henrik Norbrandt, Danish poet - with and without donkey ears as Henrik wanted, June 2018

12. Jørgen Haugen Sørensen, modeling my husband Jørgen Haugen Sørensen asleep in a chair, June 2018

13. Henning Camre, Danish cinema and film industry administrator, January 2019

14. Regitze Oppenhejm, Project Development, Legal Affairs Consultant, January 2019

15. Thomas Boberg, Danish poet and translator, son of the poet Jørgen Boberg, January 2020

16. Cher Lewis, Pietrasanta, February, 2021

17. Crying boy, Matthias Grünewald tegning, February 2021

18. Patricia Franceschetti, photographer, Pietrasanta, March, 2021

In development:

19. Morten Søndergaard, Danish writer, translator, proofreader and artist, August 2018, April 2019, March 2021

20 Salvatore Mazza, March 2021

And more …

Eli Benveniste  2020

Tendency to gang Up, 2016 

Eli Benveniste, 2019

For a long time I have made sculptures according to drawings, they are not only sketches but actual recipes. I read the drawing contour three-dimensionally. The outline of a sculpture from a certain angle. At the same time, there are many possibilities within the framework of a line drawing and the sculptures I show here are variations over the same contour drawing.

When I drew the drawing, my idea was that the front of the body could be read as a back, as if the body had turned, while the "legs" were still coming out from the hips.

I sought a certain spatiality and wanted to express the essence of a movement.

As for the modeling, I thought, how little is needed? Where does the boundary between unrecognizability go to where I have, in fact, gone too far, when the desire to make my idea visible instead gets the first freshness that naturally arises during the construction of a sculpture killed. That's why I released them as soon as possible, when they were just as readable, caught in the moment.

The five sculptures have now been raw-burned in my workshop for two years, without being finished. They were from that time the Colorists no longer had to exhibit on the Free. Now the Colorists are back on and I continue where I left off, and have made two more variations. Those who lacked to complete the series of "Tendency to gang Up".

A Matter of Empathy, 2015

Manifesto 1. The creative, the conservative and the destructive man

Manifesto 2. The Missing Link

Manifesto 3. We do it because we can - A timeline

Manifesto 4. The common man's paranoia

Manifesto 5. If Only

"A Question of Empathy" A video screenplay from the Round Tower 2011,

Filmed and cut by Eli Benveniste, duration 9 mm

Ornamental Tales, 2014

For a ceramic exhibition, at Galleri R2 in Bornholm in 2014, I made a number of plates. I call them "Ornamental tales" because it is the ornament, in relation to the shape I have been working with. The more than 3000 year old Minoan art from Crete has always fascinated me and there are some jars from here, with painted red octopusses, where the ornament is so perfectly adapted to the shape of the jar and at the same time depicts a very lifelike octopus that has sent me in this direction. 

But I did not paint the surface, but instead scratched figures into the clay and glazed the line. It has been fun and interesting to go to another world and get to know the pottery technique and problems better.

All the things unsaid, 2012-13

performance in clay, 2010

our reality, their illusion, 2009

Times alphabet, 2007-2008

the eternal now, no shadows without light and cosmos and chaos, 2008

burka and babel, 2007

the executioners' hymn, 2007

codes, 2006

short cuts, 2005

anonymous memory, 2004-2005

It was a pleasant surprise to discover that my bronze sculpture Hippocamp from 2003, which was sold to the Danish National Gallery in 2007, was included in the exhibition "Danish artists over 150 years in the Sculpture Street at the Danish National Gallery.

Hippocamp is the result of a splicing between a horse that rolls in the snow and a Viking ship I had seen at the vikingtidsmuseet in Oslo.
The movement that sums up these elements are the elevation of the tall head in profile, which turns into the wide broad shape, is an expression that characterizes many of my sculptures.

the high L and the low l, 2003

happenings in coloured glass, 2002

Acqua passata and the abstract shadows, 1999-2002

November 2000 - This Room is About

Clay, glass, light, water, gibs and shadows

Sculptures in clay - like earth, a body a thought of transit

Lighting houses - an atmosphere formed by the size and lightness of the room,

as the walls throw back.

Direct light - like dazzle

Indirect light - which can enhance a thought

Darkness - like memory, like black sculptures

Glass - like liquid water, of the same shape as shadows

Water - in motion, the memory brings with it in its flow

- Aqua Passata, lets go undone

Black sculpture - a dead without owner, colored by the water that drives by

Light - as now, as seeing, being conscious of one's thoughts

Glass sculpture - in the form of a reverse mountain filled to the brim with water

lets light pass through it,

to gather its shape into a single luminous point

Shadows - make even dead things come alive,

Do not discern, do not judge, forget no one

bound to the light, long for the darkness that will overshadow them

Light shadows - which cast diffused light on black living sculptures of dead

Dark water - reflecting the light

Water in motion - which blurs its reflection

White shadows - like inverted sculptures

White sculptures - casting black shadow

the mountain and the lake, 1998-2002

nature morte, 2000

primavera in extremaduras, 1994-1996

the replaceable, 1997

conversations with a human being, 1992-1994

Walls and light, 1989-1993

calligraphy, 1991-1993

erected lying postures, 1990-1992

movement in excessive perspective, 1987-1990

the family clan, 1987

raval, 1985-1988