Text

Her best-known work is undoubtedly the Indisch Monument. But The Hague has more than one sculpture by the Bulgarian born Jaroslawa Dankowa. There is the bronze 'Some other spring' of a girl with her hands in the air in the park at the intersection Cypresstraat/Fahrenheitstraat. Perhaps the title of the sculpture from 1980 refers to the song 'Some other spring', sung by Billie Holiday. This song is about a lost love, with hope for a new love in another spring. That would explain the girl's sombre face and her hopeful raised arms.

Not as highly stylised or elongated as most of her human figures, this girl is nevertheless a typical Dankowa. It expresses sadness and hope at the same time. Dankowa was not 'concerned with the physical reality of man, but with the other which is behind it,' she said in an interview with the Haagsche Courant of 16 October 1996.

Stimulated by her sister, a sculptor in Norway, Dankowa began her studies at the Free Academy in The Hague ten years after her flight to the Netherlands in 1958. In 1963 she got her own studio. She made free work and carried out portrait commissions. Dankowa's heads are very naturalistic and strongly express the personality of her model. Gradually she developed her own signature. Her work remained figurative, but is not always naturalistic like her early portraits. Bodies are stylised and unnaturally long. Sometimes she went a step further. For instance, she made bronzes with groups of people running or walking. We only see the spindly legs and the hips. The upper body is replaced by a stick with a parasol or a flag in the top. The images are funny, but certainly meant to be ironic. Man has lost his individuality.