CAROLE FEUERMAN
Carole Feuerman (b. 1945, Connecticut, US), is recognized as one of the world’s most renowned hyper-realist sculptors since the 1970s. Together with sculptors Duane Hanson and John De Andrea, she was one of the three leaders that started the hyperrealist movement in the late 1970’s. Her work explores classicism, while presenting common themes that occur in our everyday lives.
The sculptures tell powerful stories of experiences the artist has encountered in her own life, presenting their universality and her feelings regarding them. Evoking inward emotions, Feuerman invites the spectator to identify with the narrative they see before them. Her prolific career spans across four decades in which she has pioneered new approaches to sculpture. She is the only figurative artist to hyperrealistic paint bronze for outdoor public art, painting bronze to look like flesh, and the only sculptor to install these painted bronze sculptures in water.
Feuerman’s approach to depicting the human form is full of the care and intensity reminiscent of Bernini’s marble sculptures in the late Renaissance. Nail beds are imperfect, the bottoms of feet naturally wrinkled, and the skin is tanned and covered in strikingly realistic water droplets. The intense physicality of her work acts as a vehicle for more nuanced investigations into human emotions and psychology.
The success of each of Feuerman’s works hinges on the believability of it. It is quite easy to stand in front of the artist’s work and shift our sense of reality. When the physical materials of the artwork, the resin, the bronze and the paint and lacquer are perceived as nothing other than skin and flesh, what we are left with is the truth, the psychological story of each figure.
Feuerman herself maintains the populist focus by portraying ordinary people in everyday situations - a woman in an inner tube at the seaside, or a child playing baseball thus making her work instantly accessible. Noted in particular for her images of swimmers, she possesses an uncanny ability to recreate the optical illusion of water droplets and perspiration on a human body.
All this requires an outstanding skill in figure drawing, rigorous attention to casting, and a talent for breathing life into her models through the meticulous rendition of wrinkles, freckles, pores, lips, teeth, eyes, hair, skin color and other features.
Feuerman has been honored with nine solo major museum retrospectives to date. Her work has been showcased in numerous exhibitions including the Venice Biennale, the State Hermitage, the Palazzo Strozzi Foundation, the Kunstmuseum Ahlen, the Archeological Musei di Fiesole, and the Circulo de Bellas Artes. She won first prize at the Austrian Biennale, the Florence Biennale, the 2008 Olympic Fine
Art Exhibition, best in show at the Beijing Biennale, and best in the show at the Save the Arts Foundation as Museum’s Choice. She has also won a Peabody. One of Feuerman’s most recognizable pieces, “The Golden Mean”, can be seen in the Riverfront Green Park overlooking the Hudson River and is owned by the City of Peekskill in NY. Her “Monumental Double Diver” is owned by the City of Sunnyvale in Silicon Valley, California. Her sculptures are included in the permanent collections of 19 museums, and the selected private collections of the Emperor of Japan, President William Clinton, Norman
Brahman, the Caldic Collection, Mark Parker of Nike and Malcolm Forbes. Feuerman continues her focus on public outdoor sculptures and smaller works for private collections. She lives in New York City and maintains two studios, one in Chelsea and the other at the Mana Contemporary in NJ.
On an ongoing basis, Feuerman’s work can be seen in selected museums and public and private collections worldwide.
She is represented in Israel by Zemack Contemporary Art
Gallery.