The sculptures of the great Constantin Brâncuși came to life at PlusKids, around 19 February.
The children made the Table of Silence from clay, built the Endless Column out of plastic cups and drew the sculpture The Kiss. All the activities came with educational facts about the artist.
Brâncuși is perhaps the most suitable sculptor for children, precisely because his forms are simple. A child cannot reproduce a complicated work, but they can make an egg, a column of repeated elements, or two shapes pressed against one another. And when they remake the work with their own hands, they understand something a photograph cannot explain: that simplicity does not mean ease, but choosing what to take away until only the essential is left.
The Endless Column built from cups explained the idea of repetition best of all. You can see at once that the element repeats without end and that, in theory, the column could go on as far as the ceiling allows — which is exactly the idea behind its name.
And the Table of Silence, modelled in clay, moves the conversation elsewhere: why a table with stools can be a sculpture, and what happens when an ordinary object is looked at attentively.
A day on which Romanian art passed through the children's hands, not merely in front of their eyes.