Anton Bakker: Perspectives of Symmetry

This month, American-Dutch sculptor Anton Bakker will be making his solo exhibition debut in the Middle East with Leila Heller Gallery. The exhibition, titled Perspectives of Symmetry, will run from November 10, 2021 until January 11, 2022 at the gallery’s Dubai location, and will feature bronze and steel sculptures in the artist’s signature style.

Anton Bakker never set out to be an artist, but when he found beauty in numbers and the shapes they could generate, he jumped from science to art -- taking mathematics with him. "Perspectives in Symmetry" is a project in giving form to concepts -- which all art does, but here the concepts are numerical, readily recognized by mathematicians. In fact, the generated shapes are themselves part and parcel of advanced mathematics, but in bringing them forth as inherently beautiful forms, Bakker awakens us to the transcendent power of the universe at its null point -- not reduced to numbers, but elevated to them.

Beauty resides in symmetry, Bakker insists, and emphasizes the point by describing elaborate symmetric structures that beguile the eye. These structures are striking just as drawings, but as sculptures they stand as monuments to the human mind, the natural order, and the magical potency of numbers. Bakker's artworks maintain the elusive drama of modern abstraction by finding its basis in numbers and the relationships numbers represent. The glory of pure form, as the geometers of ancient Greece and the architects of the Islamic renaissance knew, needs no justification; numbers are beauty incarnate.