duane

Issue #44

Last Update March 2, 2006

Arts Duane Hanson by Sten Grynir The Boca Raton Museum of Art has just closed a special exhibit of the sculpture of Duane Hanson. Hanson specializes in eerily lifelike, full-sized people with clothing and accessories suitable to their personalities.

Included in this exhibit were sculptures of a cheerleader, a teenage surfer, a body builder, a man on a lawn mower, a security guard, a woman in a bathing suit sunbathing, a cleaning lady with cart of cleaning supplies, a flea market lady with a blanket full of junk for sale, a toddler in a stroller, a high school student, and a seated tourist with a camera. Exquisitely detailed, with extremely lifelike skin, hair and eyes, these figures are ordinary people doing ordinary things.

Approaching the cheerleader for a closeup view of the face, I had the uncomfortable feeling that I was encroaching on someone's personal space, and that I was likely to get slapped for it. It's not so much that the bodies are well done (though they are), or that the detailing is perfect (which it is); the faces are those of individuals with real personality. The man on the mower, holding a can of beer, has a fleshy red-neck look. The flea market lady sitting beside her blanketful of junk has the bored yet hopeful expression one sees on outdoor vendors of all kinds.

The figures that would be out of place in a museum are easy to recognize as sculpture; those that one might encounter in a museum setting require a second or third look before accepting them as statuary. The security guard is superb. Posed against a short stretch of wall separating two rooms, it took me minutes to decide he wasn't alive. The man with the camera, seated with legs splayed on a reversed folding chair and fiddling with his camera, was completely lifelike. The cleaning lady pushing her cart of cleaning supplies would have fooled anyone were it not for the fact that no cleaning lady would stand still for more than a second or so.

Perfect likenesses in portraits or photographs fill us with admiration. Hanson’s perfect likenesses make us uncomfortable and elated at the same time.

Current exhibits at the Boca Raton Museum of Art include Lesser Ury: An Early Jewish Modernist Painter, Modern and Contemporary Work from Private Israeli Collections, and The Writing on the Wall: Paintings by Michal Sedaka.

The Boca Raton Museum of Art, 501 Plaza Real, Mizner Park, Boca Raton FL 33432 (www.bocamuseum.org)