This exhibition features a series of sculptures by the New York artist Carole Feuerman begun in 1976 and never-before publicly exhibited in the United States. For Feuerman, these fragments represented a first foray into figurative sculpture, a Pop realism more provocative than any other artist was then proposing. This exploration was halted, however, after a debut exhibition in Fort Worth was censored by its organizers in 1978. She continued, nevertheless, to sculpt the figure, refining a style of superrealistic representation whose evocative titles invite social and even psychological interpretation. In this way, Feuerman aims to capture not only the surface of her subjects, but their inner lives and emotional states as well.

More than mere realism, Feuerman’s art delves deeper, and is as concerned with portraying private states—oftentimes states of grace or “transcendence”—as with imitating the details of nature. This is what distinguishes her from the cohort of American sculptors—George Segal, Duane Hanson, Robert Gober—who, like Feuerman, responded to the influence of advertising and the Pop art of the 1960s with their own brands of realism. Pop art in painting had been synonymous with male artists in New York like Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, and it was men, in the same scene, who were hailed as “pioneers” of Pop sculpture.

Feuerman’s pedigree, in fact, is strikingly similar to Warhol’s. Both met with early success as illustrators in advertising. Feuerman, like Warhol, even designed record art for The Rolling Stones. Turning to fine art, both experimented with mechanical techniques that allowed them to work in series—Warhol with silkscreen painting, Feuerman with casts made from life. True to a Pop aesthetic of ready-made subjects (figures cast from life), repeated motifs (sculptures in series), and campy humor, the rough edges of Feuerman’s compositions also recall photographic vignettes torn from magazines.