Anna Chromy, an artist commissioned to create a sculpture for the Athletes Village at the 2012 London Olympics, would like to see her 50tonne Carrara Marble 'Cloak of Conscience' installed in London.

Anna has 60 sculptures standing in public places across Europe and last year became the first Western artist to be given a solo exhibition at the National Museum in Beijing, China. Her awards include: the Prize Salvador Dali, Kafka and Masaryk and the much coveted Premio Michelangelo, the first time it was awarded to a woman.

Anna is the quintessential European, a Czech who grew up in Austria and is now based on the Mediterranean in Monte Carlo. ‘The Cloak of Conscience’ is her biggest piece, so big that people can walk inside it. The marble comes from the same quarry that produced the five-ton block from which Michelangelo produced his famous statue of David.

In Europe you are never too far from an Anna Chromy sculpture – she believes she has more sculpture on public display than any other living artist. They can be seen from Jerusalem to Luxemburg. Stuttgart, Prague, Salzburg, Munich, Monaco, Milan, Menton, Pisa, Florence and Bologna all have her works. And for two months in 2005 her sculpture dominated the Place Vendome in Paris. In Portofino, Italy, her 'Dancer' graces the famous yacht harbor and in Pisa the 'Myth of Sysiphus' stands as the symbol of the University. 

Anna Chromy says: “My work starts with respect for the classical sculpture of Greece and Rome as well as that of Michelangelo and Bernini. The spirit of humanity and our relationship to nature that is central to their work is what drives my own creative process."

As a student at the Academy of Fine Arts in Paris she met Salvador Dali. For many years she was a painter but when she suffered a catastrophic accident in 1992, which had a profound effect on her, she headed in an entirely new direction as she recovered. The direction was sculpture. And the move to sculpture has created something monumental in the 'Cloak of Conscience'.

It came about as the result of the Abbot of the Holy Monastery of Saint Francis in Assisi asking Anna in 2005 if she could create a sculpture from one of her paintings, the Cloak. It was to create a space of meditation, according to the words of Saint Francis “to use in the absence of a consecrated space, our own body as a place for prayer and contemplation”.

To carve it from a single block of white marble Anna had to wait a whole year until she received on Christmas Eve 2006 the news that the famous Michelangelo quarry in the Apuan Mountains in Tuscany had finally yielded a piece of marble large enough for the project. It weighed 250tonnes.

Anna Chromy detests immobility. She sees it is a symbol of death, as Le Figaro art critic Philippe Cruysmans once wrote. Salvador Dali said: “Lack of movement is the least one should expect from a statue.” And Anna’s sculpture takes that minimal requirement to its ultimate. Her sculptures might not move but they certainly do not lack movement.