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He shaped a world: Leo Mol dies
Leo Mol (WINNIPEG FREE PRESS ARCHIVES)
Winnipeg sculptor Leo Mol , seen in 2000, died Saturday at age 94. (WINNIPEG FREE PRESS ARCHIVES)
WINNIPEG - Winnipeg sculptor Leo Mol has died at age 94.
Mol died peacefully on Saturday at the Tache Centre medical facility surrounded by family and friends.
Originally born Leonid Molodozhanyn in Ukraine, many of his bronze statues are known and loved by Winnipeggers and people from around the world who have visited the Leo Mol Sculpture Garden, one of the most popular features at the Assiniboine Park.
He was a prolific artist and some of his works include likenesses of three different Popes which stand in museums in the Vatican.
In addition to the realistic bronze statues at his sculpture garden some of his major works include the sculpture of Queen Elizabeth II in the courtyard between the Centennial Concert Hall and the Manitoba Museum and a life-sized statue of former Prime Minister John Diefenbaker on Parliament Hill in Ottawa.
"He was a great man," said Dr. Jaroslaw Barwinsky, a retired cardiac surgeon in Winnipeg. "He was able to express his appreciation for the beauty of creation and our culture."
Assiniboine Park’s Leo Mol Sculpture Garden, where much of Mol’s sculpture is displayed, "is one of the nicest things in the history of art in Canada," Barwinsky, 82, said.
"It’s because of this that Winnipeg is a centre of this type of art."
Barwinsky knew Mol for more than 30 years.
"Besides being a great artist, he was a very friendly person."
Mol’s father was a potter and as a young teenager he move to Vienna to start his art apprenticeship. He lived in Berlin during the war years and emigrated to Canada as farm hand in Saskatchewan on New Year’s day, 1949.
He moved to Winnipeg months later and the first breakthrough in his art career came when he won an international commission to do a five-metre tall sculpture of Ukrainian writer Taras Shevchenko in Washington D.C. in the early 1960s.
History
Updated on Monday, July 6, 2009 at 10:40 AM CDT:
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