Graziella, 2025
Bronze on a stained oak plinth
Bust: 55 × 44 × 22 cm
Overall height including plinth: 179 cm

Giardino Botanico André Heller, Gardone Riviera, Lake Garda
Unveiled September 2026

Commissioned by Hans and Jovanka Porsche, Graziella honours Graziella Belli, director of the Giardino Botanico André Heller, who has cared for the garden since 1989. For decades, her knowledge, care and vision have helped shape the relationships between its plants, artworks and visitors.

I modelled the portrait from life, observing the firmness with which Graziella holds her head and directs her gaze, alongside her warmth and humour. Once the likeness was approved, Hans and Jovanka gave me the creative freedom to develop the sculpture around her relationship with the garden.

I lengthened the neck and broadened the shoulders into an enclosing silhouette. The protective cloak of a medieval Madonna della Misericordia suggested how care might be expressed through breadth and enclosure rather than a literal gesture.

Across the shoulders, I incised drawings of garden sculptures by André Heller, Dashi Namdakov, Keith Haring, Roy Lichtenstein, Rudolf Hirt and Edgar Tezak. Some remain recognisable; others appear as fragments or outlines. Henri Gaudier-Brzeska’s 1913 portrait of Horace Brodzky informed this use of incision within a modelled surface. Rather than forming a catalogue of the garden’s collection, the drawings became part of the portrait’s skin: traces of the artworks Graziella has lived alongside and watched over.

René Magritte’s The Man in the Bowler Hat offered a contrasting reference for the treatment of her glasses. Where Magritte’s bird conceals the face, Graziella’s characteristic frames cross her features while contributing to their recognition. They belong to the likeness, not merely as an accessory but as part of her familiar presence.

The oak plinth brings the portrait to the scale of a standing person. Its proportions and horizontal bands were informed by an Etruscan Caeretan hydria made in Cerveteri around 525 BC. The vessel’s swelling silhouette and measured divisions suggested how to give the portrait height without separating it from its support. Its association with water also felt fitting for someone who has sustained a living garden for so long.

The near-black bronze and charcoal-coloured oak unite the composition, while the marks of modelling and the natural grain of the wood remain distinct. Positioned at the garden’s highest point, Graziella commemorates her care within the landscape she continues to shape.

Bronze cast by Pangolin Editions
Oak plinth made and finished by Michael Williams