“Unquestionably the greatest photographer of sculpting in the world, who himself became a sculptor”

- Tom Rosenthal, The Listener, 1960s

The present work depicts a statue of a female figure from the east pediment of Parthenon, now in London’s British Museum. The marbles were sculpted under the direction of Phidias for the Parthenon at Athens (447 - 432 B.C.), but were later removed by the British Lord Elgin between 1801–1812, whilst Greece was under Ottoman rule and later sold to the British Museum in 1816. Artistically, the Parthenon Marbles represent the pinnacle of Classical Greek sculpture; they embody idealised naturalism, perfect human proportion, and masterful drapery that conveys movement and emotion in stone. Their compositions transformed Western art, influencing Renaissance and Neoclassical aesthetics, and remain key exemplars of harmony, balance, and sculptural perfection.

Frederick Leslie Kenett was born in Berlin in 1924 to a German Jewish doctor. Kenett was forced to flee the country from the Nazi’s in 1939 and came to England, joining the US Intelligence Corps during the war, where he developed an interest in photography. After the war he enrolled at the Guildford School of Art to study photography. Following his studies Kenett undertook important commissions for museums, publishers, governments and collections across the world, specialising in photographs of sculpture and works of art. From the mid-sixties he stopped his work as a photographer to focus on becoming a sculptor himself, exhibiting in London and working in a studio flat in Kensington.