Ours chaman by Sophie Verger belongs to the artist’s poetic and symbolic bears and fish series, where animal presence becomes a vehicle for narrative, memory, and transformation.

The sculpture was inspired by an archival photograph discovered at a flea market depicting a Central Asian shaman wearing a bear skin, as well as by a striking scene from the Coen brothers’ film True Grit, in which a healer emerges from a dark forest covered in a bear hide. Rather than representing a human wearing the animal, Sophie Verger reverses the perspective: here, the bear itself becomes the shaman.

Holding a drum and three fish, the figure appears to invoke the spirit of the river in a ritual gesture calling for abundance. Through this inversion of roles between human and animal, the sculpture evokes ancestral relationships between nature, spirituality, and survival traditions.

The warm brown patina enhances the tactile strength of the bear, while the fish—treated with iron nitrate—introduce chromatic contrast and symbolic rhythm within the composition. This balance between material presence and narrative depth reflects Sophie Verger’s distinctive sculptural language, situated between observation, mythology, and poetic interpretation.

Highly appreciated by collectors of contemporary animal sculpture, Ours chaman embodies the artist’s ability to transform animal figures into carriers of memory, ritual imagery, and universal storytelling within contemporary European figurative sculpture.