Ung ubekendt pige 1843

Curator: This is Harald Conradsen’s marble sculpture, "Ung ubekendt pige," created in 1843, and currently residing at the SMK, the National Gallery of Denmark. Editor: It’s hauntingly serene, isn't it? The smooth, pale marble gives her an almost ethereal quality, but also renders her remote, as if forever out of reach. Curator: Precisely. Conradsen's sculpture exists in the realm of neoclassical aesthetics where beauty resides in cool perfection and idealized forms. The work definitely references antique sculptures but in a new spirit of realism that characterizes that historical moment. Editor: I’m drawn to her gaze; there’s a stillness in her eyes, devoid of specific emotion, that allows the viewer to project their own feelings onto her. I can almost feel a deep-seated melancholy, even pensiveness about her. The small curls that fall around the girl's face add softness, and, maybe, a touch of fleeting youthful innocence. Curator: This sort of portrait bust was quite popular at the time amongst the bourgeois class. The question of whether she was based on a real person or is simply an idealized figure made up of assembled parts of an ideal female archetype adds an aura of mystery to this piece. The title, which in English means "Unknown Girl," points towards a universality which could relate this individual likeness to more common aesthetic ideas. Editor: And yet the title emphasizes her unknowable essence, turning her into an emblem of a forgotten past and vanished people. There is such potential contained in that stillness. You want to know who she was, to pierce her silence and learn something of the hidden histories she carries within. Curator: Well, perhaps it’s the way the artist sought to represent a new idea of beauty as civic ideal and the emerging national consciousness. Her face represents both, and the tension in the artwork lies there. Editor: The sculpture allows us to pause, and to contemplate on the power of portraits in connecting with histories that are simultaneously distant and close, known and unknown. Curator: Absolutely, and analyzing it allows one to remember how artists both reflect their contemporary ideas and transmit an older, shared cultural past.