How China gave sculpture’s queen of hyperrealism Carole A. Feuerman one of her first big breaks
‘Europe and China got it,’ says New York artist of her lifelike sculptures of swimmers and others. ‘Showing in other continents helped me make it in the US’
There is something in Carole A. Feuerman’s art that provokes visitors to her exhibitions to linger and stare for an uncommonly long time. They might be marvelling at the tiny pouf of belly over a bikini bottom, or the muscle tone in a slender upper arm, or be tempted to reach out and catch a droplet of water from the angled chin of one of her sculptures.
After all, there is a reason that Feuerman is considered the queen of hyperrealism. The New York-based sculptor, who has mounted exhibitions in China, Korea, Miami, St Tropez, London, Germany, Positano and Capri (and that was just last year), creates pieces so lifelike that it’s hard not to feel rude because of all that staring.
Feueurman was in her Manhattan studio on a frosty December morning, shortly after wrapping a month-long solo show at the Huan Tai Hu Museum in Changzhou in China’s Jiangsu province. She has had a long relationship with the country, after submitting a piece 25 years ago to a sculpture park in a remote region. In 2015, she had a show at Harbour City in Hong Kong.
And it all started, she says, from her fascination with aquatics; the pieces that Feuerman is most noted for are of swimmers – graceful, lean, life-sized sculptures that seem, on the surface, to be whimsical but are actually studies in the human form.
Feuerman bases her swimming series on her childhood beach excursions in Long Island, where she would focus on the patterns of droplets that formed on her skin, and how there seemed something so harmonious about the act of a body dipping into and out of the water.