Today’s popular heroes are no longer mighty, the builder of empires, the inventors and archives. Our celebrities are movie start and singers, beautiful people of leisure who profess a philosophy of enjoyment rather than discipline and toil. Henry Pachter

180 cm and 89 kg, 174 cm and 52 kog, 162 cm and 66 kg, 176 cm and 97 kg, 160 cm and 60 kg, 154 cm and 60 kg, 169 cm and 70 kg, 163 cm and 80 kg. The association of these two dimensions of the human body, height and weight, should not be contributing decisively to our physical or mental wellbeing. But, already, 50% of the pre-school little girls with ages between 3 and 5 are concerned about their body weight*. It is, undoubtedly, a question of social pressure. The constant increase in social norms changes the beauty canon, relying more on the hope of an increase in clothing sales than on the golden section. Size zero has been promoted for a while now, now it has come to double zero or triple zero even. Marius Purice – with his 162 cm and 75 kg – shows the commercialisation of the female figure leading to the complete loss of its uniqueness and identity. The human body, this endless and boring pretext for perfection, has been sought for too many years in marble, plaster, terracotta, stone and wood. The body, used as a canvas or an instrument for expression, deformed by mutilations as a symbol of social status, serves Marius Purice for a careful inventory of the forms that compose it. Using wood, which he dresses up in resin, copper plate or metal, Purice analyses the social anthropology of female forms. Out of a necessity induced by the support he uses, Purice knowingly distorts the 90/60/90 canon and the female bodies he sculpts lay hidden at Aiurart, waiting, in a hypocritical – puritanical, orthodox – society, for a new sexual revolution. Completed throught his Vasile Pârvan scholarhip in Rome, Purice’s sculptures make full use of the Aiurart architecture to let themselves be discovered. The complementary typologies that Marius Purice displays in (i) Love Me express not only a beauty idealised through the obvious differences and romanticised, but rather a reality of beauty.

* British Journal of Developmental Psychology, volume 28, Issue 2, pag. 413–426, june 2010.
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Marius Purice (born 1982) has a M.A. in sculpture from the National University of Arts in Bucharest (2007). He has exhibited at The Road to Contemporary Art (2009, 2010). In 2011 he exhibited within Spazi Aperti la Accademia di Romania din Roma having Luisa Conte as curator. He spent 3 years in Rome as a Vasile Pârvan scholar and the Catel Foundation. He lives and works in Bucharest.

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