May 14, 2020
Duane Hanson
A friend brought me to a Duane Hanson exhibition at the Michener Art Museum in Doylestown, PA. I didn’t know anything about the artist. It was remarkable, and helped develop my current interest in reproduction as an art form. I had already started working on the Academy Award Action Figures by that time, but I hadn’t yet thought through exactly what I was doing or what was motivating me. Seeing that show really helped the wheels keep truing for me.
This slide show contains work from many different series, not just the exhibition I saw in 2006, but the text below is from the Michener Show.
Duane Hanson: Real Life
September 16, 2006 – January 14, 2007 Wachovia Gallery
Duane Hanson (1925-1996) was one of the most important American sculptors of the twentieth century, with numerous major museum exhibitions including solo shows at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Musee des Beaux Arts de Montreal. He became famous in the 1960s and ’70s for his lifelike sculptures of everyday people that were cast from live models, then painted in great detail and finished with hair, clothing, and such ordinary objects as cups, purses, and chairs.
His work is often mistakenly thought of as simply a form of extreme realism, but in fact it grew out of a highly developed social conscience; his early sculptures included victims of violence and war, and eventually he expanded his subjects to include workers, athletes, children, and other commonplace figures. ‘I’m not duplicating life, I’m making a statement about human values,’ he said. ‘I show the empty-headedness, the fatigue, the aging, the frustration. These people can’t keep up with the competition. They’re left out, psychologically handicapped.’
