APRIL 07 - MAY 28, 2005
Painted Bronzes & Plasters
Untitled Kneeling Figure (Cast 1/4)
NER-314-SC
Hackett-Freedman Gallery of San Francisco proudly presents an exhibition of recent painted bronze and plaster figures by preeminent Bay Area sculptor Manuel Neri, through May 28, 2005.
These works, many on display for the first time, include a number of large, standing bronze and plaster female figures as well as smaller-scale works completed in the past two years. Neri’s latest sculptures are fragile, attenuated, individual, and dynamic. Each one demonstrates the artist’s ongoing interest in the female form as both a vehicle for humanity and for exploring the nature of time.
Neri’s sculpture is remarkable in that it is at once contemporary and timeless. He juxtaposes the immutability of materials against the immediacy of his paint. By casting, carving, and hand-painting his sculptures, Neri is able to explore the life processes of transformation and disintegration. As the noted art critic Thomas Albright once wrote: “Neri’s sculpture never seems so much finished as arrested, temporarily suspended at a certain point along a continuum of change and transformation.”1 These “suspensions” can be seen in work such as Coming in Last Thursday (1975;1991), which Neri brought to fruition over a period of fifteen years.
Lauded for their raw vitality, Neri’s plasters and bronzes acknowledge the painted sculpture of Marino Marini, the ceramics of Pablo Picasso, and the visceral expressionism of Willem de Kooning. His interest in worked and roughened surfaces spans more than five decades and descends from the late-fifties Bay Area Figurative aesthetic. Indeed, his early work in plaster has been described as a sculptural parallel to the paintings of his San Francisco Art Institute teachers and colleagues Elmer Bischoff, David Park, and Richard Diebenkorn.
Manuel Neri’s work is internationally renowned and has been featured in numerous solo museum and gallery exhibitions throughout the United States and abroad. His sculpture and painting is included in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; and the San Jose Museum of Art. He maintains studios in Benicia, California, and Carrara, Italy.
1 Thomas Albright, Manuel Neri (exhibition catalogue), 1988.