LONDON.- This autumn, Sotheby’s London S│2 gallery brings a slice of Middle America to the heart of Mayfair, as it draws together a selection of American sculptor Duane Hanson’s most important works for his first solo exhibition in London for over 15 years.

Famed for his life-sized, painstakingly detailed sculptural portraits of everyday Middle- American life, Hanson became one of the most influential artists of the late twentieth- century. Casting the downtrodden and world-weary as the leading lights of his work, he transformed ordinary people into extra-ordinary works of art, inviting us to reconsider the realities of the American dream.

Having produced only around 180 unique works, with many spread throughout the world’s major museum collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York) and The Ludwig Museum (Cologne), “Reality Check” provides a rare opportunity to survey Hanson’s work. The exhibition brings together key pieces including: Man on Mower, 1995, one of the final works completed by Hanson before his death, and Bus Stop Lady, 1983, which featured in the showpiece “Il Palazzo Enciclopedico” (The Encyclopedic Palace) exhibition at last year’s Venice Biennale.

Hanson had been working as an artist for more than twenty years before he began creating his hyper-real human figures in the late 1960s. Following the 1940s and 50s when Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko were dominant and abstraction was the undisputed king, his first forays into the figurative represented something of a revelation. Working from a makeshift studio in his Florida garage, he developed a defiantly individual approach to art which would influence a generation of artists to follow.

Using friends, family and people he met on the street to cast his sculptures, he carefully concealed any evidence of his artistic process, instead presenting his characters as almost living, breathing individuals. Rather than simply trying to trick viewers into thinking his subjects were real, Hanson constructed new identities for his real-life models, adding different clothes and props, to create an uncanny vision of American life.

In the words of the artist: “my work deals with people who lead lives of quiet desperation. I show the empty-headedness, the fatigue, the aging, the frustration.”