CHICAGO, IL.- KM Fine Arts announces Carole A. Feuerman | New Works, a solo exhibition of new sculptures by the artist, on view from July 31, – September 15, 2015 at the gallery’s Chicago location at 43 East Oak Street, Chicago, IL 60611. The exhibition features a selection of both life-size and small-scale works by the artist.
Carole Feuerman (b.1945) has received critical acclaim for her hyperrealist sculptures of swimmers and bathers for over forty years. A number of her most iconic images, including Balance, Serena and Miniature Quan is featured in the exhibition alongside life-size works, Christina and Next Summer. Executed in painted resin with tactile flesh and meticulous detail, Feuerman’s sculptures have a presence that is both contemporary and classical. While it is not uncommon for hyperrealist work to seem cold and unapproachable, Feuerman’s bathers, balanced and calm, are unexpectedly intimate and inviting.
Genuine mink fur is used for the replication of eyelashes and hair, and the details of the tanned skin, fingernails, and bathing suit ripples are painstakingly painted on. These details combined with the perfectly formed water droplets made of clear resin create astonishingly life-like sculptures. A number of swimmers are even dressed with swim caps that are bejeweled with red and crystalline Swarovski Crystals. The artist states that she, “sculpt[s] the human figure so lifelike, the pieces seem to breathe...This can take up to 100 different coats of paint, and glazing and sanding in between coats, to get the finish and luminosity needed. From start to finish, the process of creating a sculpture can take from 6 months to several years.”
In addition to her resin and oil sculptures, Feuerman is also works actively with bronze. Two of her bronze works, Miniature Tree and Miniature Diver will be featured in the exhibition. The body of the diver is arched into a sensuous C-shape and speaks to her understanding of the golden mean: an ancient mathematical equation epitomizing balance and proportion. The bather featured in Miniature Tree is posed with an S-curve, or contrapposto, typical of classic Greek and later Renaissance sculpture.
Feuerman lives and works in New York. She has had six museum retrospectives and her work has been exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the 2008 Olympic Fine Arts Exhibition, the Venice Biennale, The State Hermitage, and The Palazzo Strozzi Foundation, to name a few. Among her many honors are 1st-Prize-Best in Show at the Beijing Biennale, the Amelia Peabody Sculpture Award, the Betty Parsons Sculpture Award, and the Medici Award. Her work is in the selected collections of His Majesty the Emperor of Japan, President Bill Clinton and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Henry Kissinger, Mikhail Gorbachev, the Forbes Magazine Collection, the Caldic Collection, and Credit Suisse Collection. Selected public collections include Grounds for Sculpture, the El Paso Museum of Art, the Boca Raton Museum of Art, the Bass Museum and Art-st-Urban.
The Artist
Carole A. Feuerman is recognized as one of the world’s most renowned hyperrealist sculptors. Her prolific career spans four decades in which she has pioneered new approaches to sculpture. Working in both monumental and life size, she is the only figurative artist to hyperrealistically paint bronze for use in outdoor public art, and the only sculptor to install these sculptures in the water.
While attending the School of Visual Arts in New York, she painted 13 album covers used by Time Warner Records including, but not limited to, The Rolling Stones World Tour Book, Alice Cooper, and Aretha Franklin. She has been honored with six 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 Museum 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 won the Save The Arts Foundation Award as Museum Choice.
In 2000, she was elected to be a member of the International Woman’s Forum, where preeminent leaders of diverse professional achievement from finance to fine arts come together to make a difference and to take an active, leadership role in matters of importance. In 2013 her sculpture, The General’s Daughter was featured in the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition at the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery.
There are four full-color monographs written about her work: Carole Feuerman Sculpture, both editions published by Hudson Hills Press, La Scultura in Contra la Realta, which is available in multiple languages, and Swimmers, published by The Artist Book Foundation.
