In 1980, the iconic father of Art Deco Romain de Tirtoff— better known as Erté—aspired to have his beautiful drawings and paintings realized as sculpture. He selected Ira Reines, an award-winning young sculptural prodigy whose talent and passion impressed Erté.

Reines collaborated closely with Erte for eleven years, translating the master’s celebrated two-dimensional Art Deco couture designs into a series of seventy bronze sculptures.  Those sculptures were distributed worldwideand reside in the collections of well-known museums including Great Britain’s Victoria and Albert Museum and New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Since Erte’s passing in 1990, Master Sculptor Ira Reines has evolved his sculpting style known as “Sculptural Etherealism” to create his profound sculptural thesis on the relationships of order and chaos to man and divinity.  His delicate and intricately formed figures of near-perfect beauty emerge as if in the process of creation, replete with splendor and spirituality arising from the intricate relationships between order and chaos.  The artist believes that “beauty is a reflection of divinity” as beauty is born from chaos and form is created from formlessness.  Sculptures from this series are in the permanent collections of the Coral Springs Museum of Art in Florida, the Evansville Museum of Art in Indiana and the Shanghai Duolun Museum of Modern Art in China.