2024-02-12 13:45:39
Croatian artist Tomislav Horvat is not the first person to make models from matchsticks… But he may be the most ambitious.
As Day.Az reports, citing foreign media, the extraordinary Horvath used 210,000 matches to create a life-size sculpture of a pianist playing a piano, complete with match strings. Not content with this, the 34-year-old artist from the northern village of Domasinets is just a year and a half away from completing his interpretation of Michelangelo’s giant sculpture of David.
“I need another 30,000 matches to finish it. That is, in total about 430,000 will be used,” Tomislav noted. “I have been working on this for six years.”
Horvath began to realize his creative ambitions with much smaller models. But in 2013, he took on a bigger challenge – a life-size recreation of actor Al Pacino as his iconic character Don Corleone from Francis Ford Coppola’s 1972 film The Godfather. At the same time, the artist does not hide the fact that he makes the supporting structures of the sculptures themselves from papier-mâché or wood. Because at such a scale they will simply collapse.
Horvath’s second major work was The Pianist, and his third was Desperado, a thematic collection of 54,000 matches that took a year and a half to complete. And although Tomislav Horvat has exhibited his works in galleries in Croatia, including galleries in Zagreb, it is currently impossible to buy them.