“Symbiosis” Original Plaster Cast Sculpture by Natalie Krol

This sculpture by Natalie Krol is made of plaster with a beautiful bronze color finish. It is the cast for the bronze.
It shows a nude, pregnant woman resting. The expression on her face could almost suggest that the artist had surprised her model in her sleep, so relaxed and serene in her facial features. The curves are harmonious, with the protruding belly placed on its side, a position that pregnant women, after some months, adopt for comfort. The side of this sleeping beauty’s face rests on her hand. The breast is delicately concealed by the movement given to the body by the folded arm. The long hair could also be mistaken for a veil, as in the Marian iconography of pregnant Virgins. The back is a marvel of aesthetics, with rounded buttocks, a hollowed and arched back, and the ridge of the spine appearing on a very slender body.
The art celebrates beauty, with a particular focus on the representation of women as a central theme. The exploration of shapes, contours, and the various aspects surrounding the feminine mystery became an important focus. References to motherhood abound, from devotion to the fertility goddesses to the glorification of the Virgin and Child, to expressions of maternal love and its nurturing role. Over the centuries, artists were subjected to Christian and conservative morality, resulting in a limited representation of a pivotal phase in a woman’s life. This moment of transition, between no longer being a virgin and not yet being a mother, was often associated with the perception of the sinfulness of the flesh. In the 20th century, numerous works of art, both pictorial and sculptural, represented this period of a woman’s life, between celebration, demands liberation, transgression, etc. Through this sculpture, navigating between the taboo of reality and the purity of the sacred, the artist has created an elegant and inclusive homage that intertwines contemporary and historical references associated with maternity.

Natalie Krol’s entire lifetime has been spent creating artwork. she is a sculptor of monumental and miniature sculpture and her major claim to fame is being the first artist in the U.S.A. to cast fine art images in the stainless steel medium. In 1981, “Film Strip USA” located in Culver City, CA, was documented as the largest stainless steel sculpture built by a woman at that time.

Fifty-seven of her monumental-sized sculptures are viewed by the public daily in many different parts of the world. Twelve hundred and fifty original works are in private collections around the world. In Laguna, CA “Pageant of The Masters,” her monumental-sized sculpture, “Olympic Rhythms,” was reproduced, and it was represented by a live person nightly for ten weeks. She incorporated multiple artistic uses for stainless steel within a single sculpture: casting, punching, forming, welding, and scrolling.

“Silver Tornado,” a cast stainless steel bucking bull in Prescott, AZ, is engineered to stand on its two front feet only, with no external armature. The sculpture weighs four thousand pounds. It is strong enough to support twenty human bodies at one time. In 1999, she was awarded “1999 Feature Program of The Year” out of seventeen hundred entrants by Prescott’s Community Access Channel for her creation of a thirty-minute video demonstrating the phases used during the construction of her bucking bull “Silver Tornado.” The bull is bucking on Whipple Street in front of the Yavapai Regional Medical Center.

Her lifetime has been spent teaching art classes to children and adults of all ages, conducting workshops for Art Supervisors from the Los Angeles County School Districts with twenty-two schools in each teacher’s district. She created a new teaching method to convey perspective techniques for art education from kindergarten through grade twelve. She also taught sculpting and drawing classes to grades seven through twelve at the Windward School in Los Angeles, CA, and taught art classes to children aged fourteen to seventeen who are on probation after serving incarceration sentences in Prescott, Arizona.