In 1934, Russian sculptor Ivan Shadr created a sculpture of a naked woman posing with an oar unsurprisingly named “Girl with an Oar”. The eight-foot-tall statue was originally installed in Gorky Park of Moscow, meant to represent displays of athleticism and beauty. Deemed to be all kinds of wrong for the then Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, it was moved to an unknown park in Ukraine where it mysteriously disappeared.

In 1936, Shadr created Girl With An Oar Mark II, also installed in Gorky Park, where it stood until it was destroyed in 1941. Everyone involved with the production of the two statues production died the same year. The models for the two statues, Vera Voloshin and Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya were killed by Nazis the same day Shadr himself died from disease.

Shadr’s widow bronzed the plaster model of the original sculpture, where it mysteriously disappeared into the archives of the Tretyakov Gallery of Moscow. It was rediscovered in 2010 and recreated and reinstalled in Gorky Park in 2011. An artistic graffiti influenced Mark II of Girl With An Oar Mark II was also restored via 3D printing. The four-meter-tall 3D printed statue took circa a month to print in several individual parts; it was “built” and decorated by Russian artist and calligrapher Pokras Lampas, who covered the statue in quotes from modern Russian literature.

3D scanning and 3D printing has also been used to preserve and restore works of art and historical artefacts destroyed by ongoing conflicts in the Middle East.

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