Siri Hollander was born in New York in 1959, but her family quickly relocated to the south of Spain where they remained for most of her childhood. Siri’s earliest memories consist of riding massive Andalusian mares across the rolling hills of Andalusia, where these magnificent beasts and the land itself became her teachers. Arguably self-taught, Siri’s unusual and wild upbringing has certainly influenced her rough and emotional sculptures.
If you ask her how she knows a piece is finished she will simply answer that, “it’s a feeling.” With her acute sense of feeling, she has allowed her emotions and instincts to guide her through life, and her work. Siri says that “it is my familiarity with the subject (horses) that make it so I can easily bring my pieces to life and have them capture the essence of the living thing. I’ve spent many years being around horses constantly. At this point, they are more like my family than anything else.”
Hollander’s entire process formulated with the desire to make something grand. Beginning with welding together a steel armature, and then adding a mixture of cement and sand that she could collect in nearby riverbeds, this mixed media created something strong that could endure any weather. This mixture of earthy textures is also what gives Hollander’s work it’s unique character and textures. Between their unique textures and the exaggerated features of each of her work is inherently abstract, however somehow this abstract feeling helps her artwork to take on a life-like feeling.
Her use of rough textures may have been influenced by her earliest encounter with art, when Siri and her family found some ancient cave paintings in the South of Spain. The stone wall with its uneven textures and earthy pigments certainly influenced Siri at a young age. To this day Siri uses the same pigments in her original pieces (iron oxide and manganese) as those ancient cave-dwellers did in their work. These prehistoric cave paintings, along with the ancient Greek and Roman masters, inspire Siri Hollander every day to create art -- and furthermore art that will persist throughout the passing of time.
The artist currently lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico and still works nearly every day on her art. In recent years, Siri’s priority has become placing her art in public spaces. After growing up in Europe and being able to see great pieces of art nearly everywhere open to the public, she believes the ability to live with public art was a fundamental part of why she became an artist herself. Because of this, she hopes to place her pieces in public to help inspire young artists the way she was inspired as a child.
Siri Hollander sculptures are available in several mediums. One-of-a-kind steel or mixed media pieces can all be cast in small editions. Castings are done in the lost wax process either in bronze or aluminum. Aluminum pieces tend to be many times lighter than bronzes.