Artist Darius Hulea breathes life into the past with his series of incredible sculptures.
Carefully bending iron, brass, stainless steel and copper wires into abstract but recognizable portraits of famous historical leaders and thinkers, Hulea brings new context to the subjects in the modern age. He has created sculptures of figures such as the emperor Ferdinand I and the philosopher Mircea Eliade.
“I hope that people will understand that I do nothing but draw in a new way, in a durable material of the past,” Hulea shared with My Modern Met, “I can then explore and research, as an artist, mythical, Renaissance, and modern thinking by finding three-dimensional examples that describe us now in a history of the past.”
Trained in the art of classical drawing, the sculptor views his work as a form of three-dimensional “sketching” and sees himself in a line of artists who turned recycled materials into pieces of art.
“Some, like Picasso, used recycled materials or, like Calder or David Smith, industrial materials. That moment was the turning point of the sculptures that I am doing now. For me, this type of drawing is what we find in the sketches of the great artists of the Renaissance like Michelangelo and Da Vinci—serious and realistic compositions that anyone can understand.”
Check out his incredible wire sculptures on his Instagram below.
