Sculpture of Carole A. Feuerman
By Eleanor Munro

The full sweep of Carole A. Feuerman’s creative life so far has been, in her own words, “about relationships . . . the essence of people. What people are about.” As a sculptor in the vivid postmodern idiom of hyperrealism, she wants it understood that her quest has always been for images that elicit feelings. She believes, and her works bear her out, that to see a replica of the human body poised in frozen motion is to be suddenly, sometimes overwhelmingly, struck by the commonality of people’s experience. As one reviewer of her work put it, Feuerman’s sculptures expose the “secret body language with which the animal communicates.”
This idea may seem surprising applied to sculptures that exist, in most cases, as isolated, even fragmented figures — though some do form family or amorous groups. But even Feuerman’s single athletes, and portions of bodies of dancers and lovers, can be taken as she wishes — that is, as representative of excitement or pleasure, love or need. Athletic triumph is one of her favorite themes: “the exultation of the champion swimmer.” Other works describe people responding to one another, reaching out, embracing, whispering in loving ways. They show how the face lifts when it reflects affection and pride. Some fragmentary works illustrate, as Feuerman explains, “what happens to the skin when you touch a person.”
Feuerman composes her works of body parts cast from or modeled and carved after the living model. She has a magic touch with a paintbrush, applying dozens — sometimes hundreds — of coats of oil paint to create realistic flesh tones. Other works may be left in a neo-Victorian faux-marble plaster or stony whiteness. Populating her imagined world are cool, slim individuals with classic Anglo-Saxon features. They serve the artist’s intention in the way much hyperreal art can be said to serve both the makers and the appreciators, at least according to the Italian philosopher-critic-novelist Umberto Eco. “For the reproduction to be desired,” Eco writes, “the original has to be idolized.” As if in support of that idea, Feuerman’s lovers and grandmothers, children and grandfathers faithfully reproduce their adored or at least greatly admired living models, people linked to one another and to Feuerman herself by family ties, romantic desire, or mutual fondness for a sport or the dance.
Along with this charge of emotional empathy, Feuerman has a remarkable talent for both abstract form and brittle, descriptive detail, and she has not hesitated to combine these usually contradictory sculptural manners in a single work or group. That is to say, she has introduced into certain works sweeping curves of plaster, stone, metal and molded plastics; she has also turned out hyperreal passages individualized by wrinkles, body hair and cotton-weave clothing.
Her method of working is also energized, eclectic and pragmatic. To achieve the expressive end she wants, Feuerman may hand-model or carve the plaster forms — the fragmented body parts — that emerge from the mold. She may then focus on the fragment as her subject, painting its ragged edges in a way that points up its unreality. She may mount the fragment on a wall as if it were breaking through the surface, appearing on it like an apparition. But however the work is mounted or displayed, Feuerman wants the viewer to know her intent is subjective and, in that sense, narrative: “My subjectivity pulls the viewer into the work, to complete its story.”
Feuerman speaks with self-revealing fervor: “I come from an emotional place in everything I do. It just matters if you touch somebody.” When she switched from a commercial career as an illustrator to the fine art of sculpture, some thirty years ago, she found surfacing into the world of art galleries and museums not entirely easy. There were shocks and disappointments, but also quick progress and a zestful raising of sights from there to here. And all along, making art was for Feuerman what it is for all those who love what they do: a strategy of survival so that, today, with some three decades of work behind her, many national and international shows, respectable sales and five-figure auction prices, she has mustered a self-image of considerable strength, a survivor’s kit of self-encouragement.
Feuerman comes naturally, that is, by background and training, to this postmodern esthetic. As a high-achieving student at New York’s School of Visual Arts in the early 1970s, she excelled in inventing images to deliver the message. At the same time, an older, more traditional, classic — or, better yet, humanistic — subtext gives the work its narrative charm, and gives the artist her language of self-revelation. In other words, what she has aspired to through the past thirty years of hard work and self-positioning has been the creation of a world of emotionally charged images.
The span of Feuerman’s work in its quixotic variety offers more to the mind than a simple gloss on American social behavior, a description that fits the work of hyper-realist artists like Duane Hanson and John De Andrea today — those painted simulacra of working-class Americans and socially unclassifiable, buff-naked females seen often in the advertising pages of art magazines. Those other artists, Feuerman explains, want to create the illusion of a “real” body present in the “real” space of an ordinary room. “But I don’t want the presence of a body in a room,” she says. Something else, that “essence” she speaks of, drives her. “You may ask of my piece — is it real? But it has no arms! Or: where does the leg end? Or: in an embrace, who is giving, who is taking? What is expressed in a ‘real’ face may not be what is actually going on. But if I can touch a person so they can answer the question of what is actually going on . . . ”
No deeper question exists in art theory than the one of the relationship between an image and its meaning — “what is actually going on.” Every artist working in a more or less realist vein has to find a way to bring these two categories of “the real” into coherence. All the sciences of realistic reproduction stem from this exercise: anatomy, perspective, color, representational pose and expression. And the labor has paid off, so that by now “the earth groans with works of art that bear witness to humanity’s hunger for convincing images of what the mind conceives”: the painted gods of Greece, the saints of India, the Christs of Spain and Peru, the Madonnas of Brooklyn. Modernist ideas forced art in another direction, but in the past four or five decades, interest in the many modes of realism has revived, running the gamut from the ready-mades of Marcel Duchamp to the felt-wax-stone works of Joseph Beuys to Hanson’s costumed figures. Not so long ago, the critic Robert Hughes gave up trying to cover the field in a magazine article and ended by simply reminding his readers “how deceptive the surface of ‘realism’ can be — what complexities of decision and paradoxes of insight it must assimilate.”
Feuerman was clear about these matters when we spoke one day in her Manhattan studio. “Hanson worked with everyday people. His interest was to capture exactly what they are. But I’m not doing that. I’m working more in the classic tradition: creating something that isn’t. It’s either more or less beautiful than the reality. After all, beauty lies in the mind.
“I love the contradictions in this kind of work,” she continues. “Between soft flesh and hard material, or half-abstract, half-real. I want to have something of a contradiction. Take the figure Reflections. To make it appear not real, I had to stand it on a pedestal. That’s why I always display full figures on pedestals. There has to be some element that is not real. Once the figure is on the floor, it’s a ‘real person.’”
Still, even as Feuerman creates new editions of past works for new collectors today, she is aware of the contradictions in an idiom that forces the particular and the ideal together. Therefore, as she explains and demonstrates below, she is beginning to test the edges of individual sculptures, fanning and fraying them in search of new ways of representing the essential living body.
Indeed, she looks back at the trajectory of her career as a process of self-formation. “When I began in the late seventies,” she continues, “I had wanted to move toward Surrealism. But I put the idea aside and started making the fragmented figurative sculptures. Now I’m picking up the thread. No more extreme realism. I want to experiment.” She wants these new pieces to be taken as archetypal images and calls one Psyche. “You can see it’s shredded, the material spreading out, like life itself, where things are always changing, cracking, tearing.”
All in all, Feuerman’s point of view about art making, her use of materials, her choice of images, and such intangibles as her instinct for the aggressive stance needed by artists in this society, were forged in the late 1960s and early seventies, and her early work is to be understood in that context. Some of the post-abstract Pop artists, like Andy Warhol, came out of a commercial art background that sharpened their sense of the iconographic gesture and high-intensity colors and shapes. Other Pop artists like Claes Oldenburg and Roy Lichtenstein were fifteen years into their careers when Feuerman was beginning. But whereas the contrast between commercial art and their own self-designated higher goals gave work by these male artists it’s ironic or satiric spin, Feuerman had a good time in advertising and graphic design, and her work still communicates admiration, even love in some cases, for her subjects. Also, working hard in a highly paid trade gave this young woman her first taste of economic clout and confidence in her talent and staying power.
But a real difference between much women’s art of the time and that of the men lies with what Lucy Lippard once described as Pop’s “growing disdain for sentiment, and even for sensitivity, which, with anecdotalism, was a platform for the so-called humanist schools.” These very values — sentiment, sensitivity, anecdotalism and human interest — are the ones Feuerman appreciates. She is not alone. For better or worse, many women artists have lacked the detached disdain that marked Marcel Duchamp and conditioned much of American art of the 1960s and seventies.
Furthermore, women artists in the 1970s were still relatively removed from the main currents of the art gallery world. Men, as always in history, had their bonding rituals and places out of which came attention-getting esthetic collectives. But for a woman, especially one heavily involved in family, the course of self-invention in those years was slow and hazardous.
There were ideas in the wind, new artistic uses of the human figure, with which Feuerman would find an affinity when she began to consolidate her move into the fine art field. For example, in 1960, George Segal’s wife, at his direction, had wrapped and cast his seated body outside one of the chicken-coops on their New Jersey property. His future work, in its monochrome dead white, would amount to a project that would be authentic and, in a revolutionary sense at the time, humanistic. As Segal would later explain to critic John Gruen, “The human being is capable of an infinity of gestures and attitudes. My biggest job is to select and freeze the gestures that are most telling . . . I hope for a revelation, a perception [of]...a subject’s gravity and dignity . . . ” Feuerman remembers first seeing his work when she was a student at the School of Visual Arts. At once, she realized, “I could relate to his fragmented forms and environments.”
So progress was made, often through hands-on explorations with materials. Early on, Feuerman had used resins and also cast some works in bronze. After it was recognized that the resins caused cancer, she moved on to other materials: plaster, bronze, paper. “I’ve always worked with everything,” she says. In fact, postmodern sculptors have explored the most unexpected materials. Promising substances for hyper- or surrealist sculptors today are those perilous resins, as well as plaster, various marble-dust mixtures, latex and silicone. Who knows — perhaps for Carole A. Feuerman, Ana Mendieta’s raw earth or Magdalena Abakanowicz’s wrapped burlap may lie ahead.
As exhibitions in France, Sweden and major cities in this country brought Feuerman’s work to the attention of a growing public, she began to gather some intelligent critical comments. In 1992, a Vogue magazine critic, the late David Bourdon, mentioned the “upbeat” character of her athletes. The implication was that they differed in that respect from Hanson’s dour, inexpressive population. “Feuerman’s technical proficiency is formidable,” he wrote. To Steven Rosen of The Denver Post, she had earlier given a sharply considered interview about hyperrealism in general: “There is a certain amount of voyeurism — an inspection people do at close range to see if it’s a real person . . . and when you look at a fragment, you can complete a story. It’s almost like a novel, where you imagine what you’re seeing. It’s a way I can make people think for themselves.”
In sum, in the ferment of late-twentieth-century art, these sculptures by one of the few women to work in this particular realist vein retain an appealing emotionalism. So do her ingenuous remarks. The bright eyes of her figures make a clear bid for the viewer’s sympathy. And though the now three-decades-old category of hyperrealism to which they belong is an art-historical rubric with implications of philosophical density, Feuerman’s swimmers, divers and dancers, her children whose tidy bodies echo those of their elders, and even her early erotic works, seem more lightheartedly outreaching than ironic or confrontational. They are images of consensual enjoyment, drawn from the collective imagination of a body-obsessed culture in a way that is remarkably “friction-free,” as some people say of global computer transactions.




Munro, Eleanor C. (1999). Carole A. Feuerman Sculpture. Hudson Hills Press. 1-55595-177-5.
Library of Congress Catalogue-in-publishing Data - Feuerman, Carole A.
NB237 .F-46F48 1999



Copyrighted 1999 by Carole A. Feuerman owned by Carole A. Feuerman
Submitted by Carole A. Feuerman