On the facade of the Art Gallery of NSW there are several spaces intended for decorative bronze panels that were never realised. Perhaps the most important of those still empty is the one above the Gallery’s grand entrance doors. In 1913, the Gallery trustees commissioned the expatriate Australian artist Dora Ohlfsen (1869-1948) to sculpt a classical Greek chariot race in low relief for it. Though Ohlfsen worked on the piece for many years and her designs were approved, in 1919 the commission was abruptly cancelled. One hundred years later, the exhibition Dora Ohlfsen and the facade Commission examines the original commission and some exciting contemporary proposals for the space.
For the exhibition, I reconstructed a section of Ohlfsen’s maquette for her intended work Chariot Race. The plaster maquette has long since been lost and the only remaining records are a set of sepia photographs Ohlfsen made of her design. My reconstruction focused on a 40x40cm section of the relief, depicting a horse and part of the costume of a charioteer.
To reconstruct the sculpture at 1:1 scale, I first produced a greyscale height map from the extant photograph. By digitally painting height data onto a scan of the photograph, I was able to create a displacement map that, when applied to a scaled digital clay surface, indicated the location of sculptural features as well as a general, but not reliable, indication of relief depth.
Using the open-source 3D modelling package Blender, I manually sculpted the relief topology, using the source photograph as a reference, as well as the original terms of Ohlfsen’s commission in relation to the depth of the facade niche. I also used extant examples of Ohlfsen’s bronze sculptures as well as archival photographs of the conservation of competed friezes on the facade of the AGNSW, to arrive at a reasonable approximation of Ohlfsen’s technique.
This resulted in a very high resolution 3D mesh which was then retopologised and solidified with a 5mm shell, in order to make a hollow cast suitable for 3D printing. The model was then printed at 1:1 scale using an SLA resin, UV set printing process. The model was subsequently painted in matt white to give it the resemblance of plaster. We had originally intended to cast the 3D print in bronze, but decided to maintain a respectful distance from the intended original.
The model was wall mounted and accompanied by an iPad slideshow explaining the manufacturing process to visitors. After Dora Ohlfsen and the facade commisison concludes the reconstruction will be housed in the National Art Archive, Art Gallery of New South Wales.