Siri Hollander was born in New York in 1959, but her family quickly relocated to the south of Spain where they remained for most of her childhood. Siri’s earliest memories consist of riding massive Andalusian mares across the rolling hills of Andalusia, where these magnificent beasts and the land itself became her teachers. Arguably self-taught, Siri’s unusual and wild upbringing has certainly influenced her rough and emotional sculptures. Unlike most artists, with Siri’s work perfection is never the goal. If you ask her how she knows a piece is finished she will answer simply that, “it’s a feeling.” With her acute sense of feeling, she has allowed her emotions and instincts to guide her through life, and her work. She has learned from trial and error and lets her memories and first-hand knowledge guide her through the creation of her sculptures.
There was never a precise beginning to Siri Hollander’s career as an artist, it was simply a part of who she was from the beginning. She says, “When I first started it was a grand mess. I would ride around and stop by little creeks making little figures out of sticks and mud. Little by little, it got more logical, and I used more permanent materials. But it just happened. There wasn’t much thought behind it.”
Between their unique textures and the exaggerated features of each of her work is inherently abstract, however somehow this abstract feeling helps Siri’s work to take on a life-like feeling. Siri says that “It is my familiarity with the subject (horses) that make it so I can easily bring my pieces to life and have them capture the essence of the living thing. I’ve spent many years being around horses constantly. At this point, they are more like my family than anything else.” Her use of rough textures may have been influenced by her earliest encounter with art, when Siri and her family found some ancient cave paintings in the South of Spain. The stone wall with its uneven textures and earthy pigments certainly influenced Siri at a young age. To this day Siri uses the same pigments in her original pieces (iron oxide and manganese) as those ancient cave-dwellers did in their work. These prehistoric cave paintings along with the ancient Greek and Roman masters inspire Siri Hollander every day to create art, and furthermore art that will persist throughout the passing of time.