Mitch Shea American, b. 1987

Mitch Shea is an American sculptor and draftsman born in Augusta, Georgia 1987. In 2011, after having worked as an assistant sculptor on a variety of monuments in the San Francisco Bay Area, he relocated to Florence, Italy and began studying academic figurative sculpture and drawing at the Florence Academy of Art. After graduating from the Academy, he is now the director of the Sculpture program where he has been teaching since 2013. His works accommodate a multitude of priorities; namely, a deep commitment to observing nature and composing with striations of historical epochs that draw from thousands of years of cultural milieus, particularly in the figure as the central subject. Through the use of cropping, he invites the viewer to embrace the subject in an abstract level and explore the irony found in the medium and subject itself: a work conceived in a robust material that stands eternally yet anticipates movement, cast in cold bronze yet looks as if it’s composed of warm flesh and bone. Mitch believes that the continuum of pose is ultimately perpetual thus reflective of contemporary ideology.