The Bronze Sculptor Who Spent Twenty Years Studying Legs Before She Ever Cast One

ART & CULTURE · BELGIUM

Reading time: 8 min

Ozanne Princen began ballet at the age of three and did not cast her first bronze until decades later, after a career in teaching and events. Her sculptures do not depict dancers. They isolate a single part of the body, the calf, the knee, the thigh, and cast it in matte black bronze, distilling twenty years of studying movement into objects built entirely around stillness.

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Introduction

Ozanne Princen sculpts legs. Not whole figures, not dancers mid-movement, but the calf, the knee and the thigh, isolated and cast in bronze until the fragment carries more than a complete body would. It is an unusual place to start a sculptural practice, and it only makes sense once you know where Princen actually started: not in a studio, but in a ballet class, at the age of three, alongside her two sisters.

That training runs through everything she has made since, across three collections, Silhouettes Éternelles, Counterpoise and Épure, each one built from the same instinct: that a single limb, held at the right angle, can carry the memory of an entire movement without needing to show the rest of the body at all.

From a ballet barre to a foundry

Princen’s route to bronze was not direct. She trained in ballet from early childhood, then went on to study Modern History and Cultural Studies academically, a combination that gave her a formal grounding in both physical discipline and cultural analysis before she ever picked up a modelling tool. She taught history and philosophy for a period, then moved into entrepreneurship, co-founding the events company By Gaspard Wedding & Events and later launching Rouge Flammes during the pandemic. Sculpture came after all of that, when Princen began formal training in the medium and started building a practice that draws on fine art, aesthetics and design at once rather than treating them as separate disciplines.

Running an events company and a second venture through a pandemic is not the conventional route into fine art sculpture, but it is not irrelevant to it either. Both businesses required Princen to think about how a physical space and the objects inside it read to someone experiencing them directly, the same question a sculptor asks about a room a finished bronze will eventually stand in. By the time she began formal sculpture training, she had already spent years working professionally in exactly the kind of applied, spatial thinking that separates a sculptor who only makes objects from one who also considers where they will live.

It is worth pausing on how much of that earlier life shows up in the finished bronzes. A historian’s attention to what a period actually looked like, a philosopher’s interest in what a gesture means rather than just what it depicts, and two decades of a dancer’s physical vocabulary, all of it is legible in work that could easily have been made by someone with a single, more conventional art-school path. “Dance taught me to express emotion through the body,” Princen has said of her practice. “That sense of flow and discipline continues to guide my practice.”

Silhouettes Éternelles: the leg as a complete sentence

Princen’s debut collection, Silhouettes Éternelles, is where the vocabulary of her practice first appears fully formed. Each piece stands 55 centimetres high, cast at the same scale in three different finishes: Silhouette, in polished bronze; Nocturne, in a black-lacquered bronze with a satin finish; and Scarlet Noir, in a dark red lacquer, the rarest of the three at an edition of twelve rather than fifty. All three isolate the same passage of leg, calf through knee to thigh, and all three are cast using lost-wax casting, the same technique that has shaped bronze objects for millennia, here applied to a form abstracted almost to architecture.

The isolated fragment has a long history in sculpture, from the armless classical torsos that survive as ruins to Rodin’s own deliberate studies of a single hand or foot, works that were never damaged but conceived as complete in their incompleteness. Princen’s leg forms sit in that tradition rather than inventing it from nothing, though her route there, through ballet rather than art history, gives the fragment a different justification: not an accident of survival or a formal experiment, but the one part of a dancer’s body that a ballet training spends the most years disciplining.

The collection’s title translates as “eternal silhouettes,” and the phrase is doing real work rather than sitting decoratively on a page. Princen has described the ambition directly: “the legs carry the story, balance, tension, lift and release.” A dancer’s leg, held at the instant before or after a movement, is asked to do the job a whole figure usually does, and the fact that it can is the entire argument the collection makes.

Counterpoise: stillness that still remembers movement

The second collection, Counterpoise, shifts the vocabulary from performance towards repose, and adds an explicit theme: women’s empowerment, expressed through poised, reclining and crossed leg forms rather than through anything more literal. Counterpoise 01, the collection’s lead work, is cast as two separate pieces designed to be read together, one measuring 27 by 8 by 36 centimetres, the other 19 by 9 by 51, available in both polished bronze and a matte black patina.

Princen’s own description of the mechanics is precise in a way that is unusual for an artist talking about her own work: “the knee becomes a pivot, the shin a beam, the foot a soft counterweight.” It is engineering language applied to a body, which fits a practice built by someone who spent years training a leg to hold weight, transfer force and read as elegant while doing both. The matte black finish that recurs across Princen’s work is a deliberate optical choice as much as an aesthetic one: unlike polished bronze, matte black absorbs light rather than throwing it back, which sharpens the line of a form instead of letting reflections compete with it.

Épure: a leg that leaves the plinth for the wall

The most recent addition to Princen’s output, Épure, is also the piece that pushes hardest against what a bronze leg sculpture is usually expected to do. Rather than standing on a plinth, it emerges directly from a wall, in an edition of eight plus two artist’s proofs, standing 110 centimetres high. Princen has framed the work as “the dialogue between sculpture and architecture,” and the piece earns that description rather than just claiming it: a sculpture that grows out of a wall surface is no longer only an object in a room, it is a detail of the room itself, closer to a piece of applied ornament than a freestanding artwork, while still reading unmistakably as one of Princen’s own forms.

That is the clearest evidence yet of where Princen’s practice might go next, from objects that sit in a room to interventions that become part of a building’s own surface, a shift that has design consequences well beyond sculpture: a wall-mounted bronze changes how a room’s lighting, sightlines and even its structural fixings need to be planned around it, in a way a plinth-mounted piece never does.

The craft underneath the choreography

Every piece across all three collections is cast by lost-wax casting, cire perdue, the process in which a wax model is encased in a mould, then melted out to leave a cavity that molten bronze is poured into. It is a slow method: Princen’s works carry a lead time of eight to twelve weeks between commission and delivery, since each piece is cast to order rather than held in stock. The pieces are signed and numbered, each with its own two artist’s proofs held back from the numbered run, and mounted using a hidden M8 pin, a detail invisible in the finished object but essential to how a bronze leg, cantilevered at an angle no real leg could sustain unsupported, actually stays upright.

That last detail is easy to miss and worth naming directly: a Princen sculpture that reads as effortlessly balanced is, underneath the bronze, doing exactly the opposite of balancing on its own. The engineering is hidden specifically so that the illusion of poise, the entire subject of the work, is not undercut by visible hardware.

Built to live in a room, not just a gallery

Scale is one of the quieter decisions running through Princen’s work, and it is a design decision as much as an artistic one. Silhouettes Éternelles is fixed at 55 centimetres, a height chosen to sit comfortably on a plinth, console or shelf inside a domestic interior rather than requiring the kind of dedicated gallery space a life-size figure would. Counterpoise splits its single composition across two smaller objects that can be placed together or apart, giving a collector the flexibility to compose the piece within a room rather than simply positioning a single fixed object. Épure, by contrast, abandons the plinth altogether and asks a room to accommodate it structurally, on a wall, which is a different and more demanding kind of commitment from whoever buys it.

That progression, from a tabletop-scaled object towards a fixed architectural intervention, tracks a fairly deliberate arc for an early-stage sculptural practice: start with work collectors can place easily, then earn the right to ask for more permanent integration once the vocabulary is established. It is also why the work photographs the way it does. The studio images of Silhouette, shot by the Leuven-based photographer Wim Knapen at his studio, Studio Chloki, favour dark, closely lit backgrounds that let the matte and polished bronze finishes do the work rather than competing with a busy setting, the same visual logic that runs through the sculptures themselves.

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Final thoughts

It would be easy to describe Ozanne Princen’s work as sculpture about ballet, and technically that would not be wrong, but it undersells what is actually happening across three collections that never once show a whole dancer. What she has built instead is a practice that treats the leg as a complete unit of information, capable of carrying balance, tension, release and now, in Épure, a building’s own architecture, without needing the rest of the body to explain any of it. Two decades at a ballet barre taught Princen what a leg can communicate on its own. The bronze is simply where she finally wrote it down.