The ‘Guardian’ by visionary artist Alexander Ney was handcrafted using italian white terra cotta in 2008. Ney began his professional career as a highly productive visual artist, as a painter and sculptor. Sometime in the late 1950s, he began developing his unique, likely most-recognized artistic signature style involving “perforated” surfaces, and typically in terra cotta. Ney stated the following about the series, “The artworks showcased in this series are each meant to be contemplated individually, since every piece resides in its own universe; yet, there are some underlying principles that unite them all. I was recently told that someone expressed that the essence to all my works is their connection to eternity. Indeed, it is my sincere hope that my work moves along this path, escaping the decay of one historic mindset or the limitation of just one particular time and place.” 

Alexander Ney (b. 1939) is Russian-American sculptor and painter. He immigrated to the United States in 1974 and has since lived and worked in New York City. Developing several individualistic styles in modern art, he is most famous for his unique work in terra cotta sculpture, involving heavily perforated surfaces and intriguing forms. Notable collections of Ney’s sculptures, paintings and drawings are held at: Museum Beelden aan Zee, containing the largest collection of international sculpture in the Netherlands, The State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia, The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, Russia, The State Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow, Russia, The Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Moscow, Russia, The National Centre for Contemporary Arts, Moscow, Russia, The ART4.RU Museum of Contemporary Russian Art, Moscow, Russia, The Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University, USA, The Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, USA, The Yeshiva University Museum, New York, USA, The Mead Art Museum, Massachusetts, USA, The McMullen Museum of Art, Massachusetts, USA.