Studio Sem

2007 Times on Line Leicester University exhibition “Masters and Emerging Artists from Studio Sem (/review)

...
Had he been involved in the exhibition Masters and Emerging Sculptors from Studio Sem, Pietrasanta, which opened last week at the Harold Martin Botanic Garden in Leicester, he would have had the opposite problem. In the final week of the wettest June on record, the organisers were having to pour concrete foundations to stop statues from sinking into the mud.

This year’s annual Sculpture in the Garden exhibition celebrates 50 years of Studio Sem, the world-famous marble-carving workshop founded by the legendary marmista Sem Ghelardini. A teenage hero of the partisan movement, Sem set up the studio in 1957 to make the religious statuary that was then a mainstay of the marble market, only to face financial ruin five years later. The cause of his trouble, like Michelangelo’s, was the Pope – in his case John XXIII – whose Second Vatican Council called for retrenchment in religious art. While other workshops in the town went to the wall, Sem took a punt on modern abstract sculpture, producing work for avant-garde artists such as Henry Moore, André Bloc and Henri-Georges Adam.

It paid off, and he proceeded to turn his studio into a hotbed of young carving talent. One of his pro-tégées in the 1970s was the current vice-president of the Royal British Society of Sculptors, Helaine Blumenfeld – the force behind this exhibition – who recently set up the Brian Mercer Residency at Fondazione Sem to give today’s young artists a similar chance. Past beneficiaries of the scheme are among the emerging sculptors exhibiting alongside international names in this year’s show.
...