Leo Mol was born into a long family line of potters, in a community of potters in the Ukraine in 1915. At the age of four he was already shaping animals from the local clay, and by the age of 11 was working nearly full time modelling clay and working the potter’s wheel for his father. After acquiring a taste of art history Leo left home at the age of 15 to study painting in Vienna. There, he emerged as a sculptor under the apprenticeship of Wilhelm Frass, from whom Mol learned the technical craft of casting. He then left to study in Germany, ending up at the Berlin Academy. As the Soviets bore down on Berlin in 1945, Mol and his new wife Margareth fled to the Netherlands where he was able to set up a small pottery studio and learned the art of stained-glass making.

In 1948 the couple left Holland for Canada, where they eventually landed in Winnipeg. There Mol quickly found work sculpting for churches, including St. Edward’s in Winnipeg and St. Mary’s in Brandon. He also began crafting small Canadian-themed ceramic figurines, which he sold at Birks and the Canadian Handicraft Guild for 25 dollars each, the sales of which helped fund his home and studio where he and Margareth lived the rest of their lives.

During his commercial activity he maintained a personal creative practice through the 1950s, often modelling figures and portraits from terra cotta, stone and marble, some of which now reside in the permanent collections of the Art Gallery of Ontario and the National Gallery of Canada. Known to be a perfectionist in every sense, he built his own studio and foundry so that he could oversee the entire sculptural process from the initial clay molding to the final bronze casting. His growing stature as a sculptor was recognized in 1956 when he was elected President of the Manitoba Society of Artists.
In the summer of 1962 Mol won a world-wide competition to erect a fourteen-foot bronze monument in Washington D.C. to one of his personal heroes, the Ukrainian poet and painter Taras Shevchenko. To much acclaim, his labour of love was unveiled in 1964 by former president Eisenhower, with a ceremony attended by over 100,000 Americans of Ukrainian descent.

Following in the footsteps of Michelangelo and history’s great sculptors, Mol was assigned a studio space in the Vatican to sculpt the official bust of Pope Paul VI in 1967. His work was considered so successful that the Vatican asked him to complete a sculptural portrait of the previous pope, John XXIII, using archival photographs. He was asked again in 1979 to carve the official portrait of John Paul II, and after spending only minutes with the man, was able to carve his likeness simply using observation and sketches. His other famous portrait busts include Eisenhower, John G. Diefenbaker and Group of Seven members A.Y. Jackson, F.H. Varley and A.J. Casson.

In addition to an extensive sculptural resume, Mol decorated over 25 churches with stained glass windows. He was granted membership to the Royal Canadian Academy and the Sculptors Society of Canada. In 1960 he was awarded the Allied Arts Medal of the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada and in 1967 received the Centennial Gold Medal of the Government of Canada. His work is permanently displayed in the Leo Mol Sculpture Garden in Assiniboine Park in Winnipeg.