For 11 years, Thomas Ostenberg was Vice President of Citibank, and worked in international finance in New York, Brazil and Spain. He says, his biggest break was 'discovering that I wanted to be, and was, an artist at heart.' He left the commercial banking world, returned to school, earning a BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute and an MA from the Royal College of Art, London. Ostenberg maintains this change was precipitated by '15 years of seeing great art on three continents.' In particular, he cites a major Velazques exhibition in Madrid and a visit to the Rodin Museum in Paris. Among these pivotal experiences, Ostenberg's influence and inspiration is derived from Isamu Noguchi, Henri Matisse, and the Etruscans and ancient cultures. In primitive culture's art, 'The poetry, honesty, seeming innocence and lack of pretense in their work takes my breath away. I strive to achieve that in my own work,' Ostenberg says. "Success in a Material World" was one of the first pieces he ever made. The piece is a riff on his past life as a mover and shaker. Ostenberg's sculptures of "Everyman", —acrobatic, dancing, prancing, leaping figures, —find their historical antecedents in early Etruscan art, Italian bronzes, Minoan bull-leapers and the wheeled platforms of the Celts. The works contain human figures and/or frequently horses on a variety of ladders, wheels and spheres, performing acrobatics and balancing acts much like those associated with the circus. This is not to say that his sculptures are frivolous or trivial. On the contrary, what may at first appear only as a feat intended to entertain, is at a deeper level a wonderous allegory of hope, strength, stamina, and determination.