3D Printing

Painter and Sculptor Nicola Samorì Embraces 3D Printing

My cousin is the mayor’s assessor’s to the arts in a small Italian town with a rich cultural heritage and she has always been very doubtful about the use of 3D printing technologies in the world of traditional arts. After seeing some 3D printed sculptures, however, she has since opened up her mind quite a bit and a recent partnership between 3D printer manufacturer WASP and established artist Nicola Samorì, for an exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MAC) of Lissone, in Italy, would probably make her come all the way around.

Nicola Samorì is an extremely successful painter and an artist through and through. He has always been an artist from a very young age, he is very confident in his means, his work is appreciated worldwide and he is elusive and mysterious. Nevertheless he is not afraid to confront new forms of expression and for his very first sculpture exhibition “Intus – Cristalli di Crisi” he did not hesitate to explore the possibilities offered by 3D printing.

nicola wasp 3d printed sculpture

Samori’s paintings are characterized by extremely intense lines, to draw systematically deconstructed human figures inspired by Reinassance paintings. This gives his work a kind of disturbing aura and yet makes his paintings instant, timeless masterpieces. He worked with WASP to translate the strength of these images into a physical sculpture: the headless body of a lying naked man, almost two and a half meters long. The statue is a replica of a small wax model which was twisted through the pressure of the artist’s hands.

massimo moretti wasp 3d printed sculpture The difficulty here is to successfully replicate the sense of torsion, on a two and a half meter scale, thus giving the impression that the body was twisted by two gigantic size hands. To do that WASP first 3D scanned the original piece then scaled it up. The object was thus sectioned into many pieces which were still large enough to entirely fill the 400 x 600 mm build size of Wasp’s biggest commercial Delta 3D printer.

3d printed sculptureAll the parts were then soldered by the artist using fused PLA, before focusing on the surface finish. This was done through the use of direct flames as well as iron brushes or by adding molten wax. The final piece looks just like a 100 Kg stone sculpture and yet can be lifted up easily. “An interesting material”, Samorì commented after completing the work. Apparently it will not be his last venture into 3D printing, it would be impossible, for such a talented and prolific artist, to stop playing with this new toy now that he has begun to discover what it can do for his creative expression.