Duane Hanson: To Shock Ourselves
On the occasion of an exhibition at Fondation Beyeler, novelist Rachel Cusk considers the ethical and aesthetic arrangements that Duane Hanson’s sculpture initiates within the viewer.
I want to achieve a certain tough realism which speaks of the fascinating idiosyncrasies of our times.
—Duane Hanson
Gagosian New York is pleased to present Duane Hanson’s Security Guard (1990).
In his hyper-realistic sculptures portraying working-class Americans, Hanson eschewed the predominant Expressionist and Minimalist concerns of the 1950s and 1960s for an unflinching investigation of the human condition. Early life-size tableaux depicting soldiers killed in action, police brutality, and the homeless confronted viewers with devastating truths largely overlooked in the art of the time.
Throughout his forty-year career, Hanson’s uncanny sculptural likenesses of blue-collar workers—repairmen, waitresses, and bricklayers—inhabited exhibition spaces eliciting surprise, embarrassment, amusement, and sympathy from unsuspecting viewers. Although his world-weary figures owe something to Pop and Photorealism, their veracity prompted responses from viewers normally reserved for interactions with other living people. These sculptural illusions, radical in the context of their time, anticipated the later gestures of contemporary provocateurs such as Chris Burden, Maurizio Cattelan, and Fred Wilson.
On the occasion of an exhibition at Fondation Beyeler, novelist Rachel Cusk considers the ethical and aesthetic arrangements that Duane Hanson’s sculpture initiates within the viewer.
To celebrate their twenty-fifth anniversary, Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Switzerland, staged an exhibition entitled Jubiläumsausstellung—Special Guest Duane Hanson. The presentation featured several sculptures by Duane Hanson alongside more than one hundred works from the foundation’s collection. Alice Godwin considers the fertile dialogues produced by these juxtapositions.
Benjamin Nugent reflects on questions of verisimilitude and American life in the group exhibition I Don’t Like Fiction, I Like History at Gagosian, Beverly Hills.