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From the Studio to the Foundry: Three Decades of
Sculpture by Carole A. Feuerman highlights three dimensional works in resin, marble, and bronze by
this New York City artist. A trompe l'oeil sculptor who has devoted her career to visualizing the
human condition in super-realism, Feuerman's contemporary approach forges historical links with the past while revealing her compelling vision for the
future.
Feuerman's sculptural tradition can be traced to the
Second Century bronze and chiseled marble busts of Roman aristocrats, religious
leaders, and politicians. The evolution of objective figurative
portrayals in three dimensional sculpture was later revived during the European
Baroque period by sculptors like Gianlorenzo Bernini. The tradition was
continued by Jean-Antoine Houdon, the great sculptor of the 18th century
Enlightenment, as well as by the 19th century Neo-Classical sculpture of Antonio Canova. The immediacy of expression of the Impressionists led
sculptors such as Auguste Rodin to reevaluate sculpture in terms of personal
vision, setting the stage for new approaches to three dimensional work in
the 20th century and for the emergence of the United States as an
international center for
innovative experiments in sculpture.
With the advent of expressionism in late 19th century and
20th century
abstraction that continued through the 1960s, naturalism in
the rendering of the human form was temporarily overshadowed. However,
during the 1960s Pop artists, including Andy Warhol, Jim Rosenquist, Jim Dine,
and Claes Oldenburg, redefined naturalism in terms of consumerism.
Pop Art images were usually direct, literal renderings of commonplace
objects, such as soup cans and Brillo boxes, and this new realism encouraged
other artists to pursue their naturalistic inclinations in art.
It was during the 1970s that Pop Art made Realism
legitimate again, and it was during that time that three American sculptors were
inspired to revisit the traditions of the past. Working independently of one
another and with unique vocabularies and contemporary mediums, Duane Hanson,
John De Andrea and Carole A. Feuerman returned to the three dimensional
world of figurative sculpture. Each was inspired to create life size and
lifelike sculptures of the human form embellished with accessories, such as hair, clothes and a variety of props. Their work at this time was not only
visually exciting, but an effective commentary on contemporary life. Each
artist rendered the genre through an objective rather than an expressionistic
approach. Commentary on the social condition, including the tangible
realities of war and the abstract ideologies of emotions like passion and
pain, inspired each to visualize the world in terms of personal experience.
Feuerman's interest in Realism and objectivity, fidelity
of form, and truth of expression and depiction, is indicative of the artist's
formative desire to recreate the human body. Through her sculpture,
Feuerman has created portraits of ordinary people in everyday situations that
possess a universal appeal. Whether it is a woman in an inner tube at the
beach, a singer in front of a microphone, or a child playing baseball,
Feuerman's realistic
depictions make her work both accessible and familiar.
Best know for her ability to recreate the illusion of water droplets and
perspiration,
Feuerman has traditionally been known for images of bathers
and athletes.
Although she labors over preparatory sketches and life
drawing, Feuerman uses direct casting to replace three-dimensional maquettes,
and she spends most of her time duplicating the essence of her models in
paint. Clothing, teeth, pores, wrinkles and skin color are meticulously
rendered by the artist to give the viewer the impression of a living,
breathing human being.
Renowned as the originator of realistic life-cast
figurative sculpture, and as an innovator in the technique of creating
three-dimensional water drop imaging, her works are not merely casts of real human
bodies. Feuerman's resin sculptures are stereotypes and generic, each
expressing an aspect of her life. The coloring, poses and environments of each
sculpture constitute
the artist's individual comments on the human condition.
Interest in her realism has always brought Feuerman
positive critical review and continuing success. When an injury rendered
Feuerman unable to paint her resin works, she embarked upon a new direction in
sculpture, turning from painted cast resin and a mixture of resin and marble dust to bronze. She sacrificed meticulous painted detail for
molten metal free-poured into molds. By melting, dripping, splashing
and pouring metals, she now fashions multi-layered and fragmented torsos. The
unusual, variegated colors of the finished bronze pieces give them
an organic quality, imitating nature's splendor in iridescent blues,
copper, silver, greens, and lavenders. Her new bronze work reveals a dedication on the same level with her earlier works in resin.
Although her bronze sculptures rely upon the natural
colors inherent in the metals, Feuerman's new message is no less complicated and
detailed than her painted trompe l'oeil resin works. Through gesture and
technique, her figures relate the fragmentation of the shell, revealing
the internal beauty and spirit of the form. Having evolved the process over
the past two years, Feuerman has found a new medium with which to work, and, in
the process, invented a new art form.
It has been my great pleasure to share this exiting
exhibition with you for it offers a retrospective of an artist's career seen
through the evolution of her work. The exhibition includes trompe l'oeil and
photorealism in
Feuerman's sculpture of the 1970s and 1980s, her return to
classicism in the 1990s, and the development of a post-modern abstract expressionist vision in her most recent work. With 50 works of art from the
artist's career since 1970, this exhibition features provocative and life-size
sculptures of the human form by an artist whose formative interest lies in
recreating the human body.
Michael A. Tomor, Ph.D.
Executive Director
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