Statuesque

The Nasher Sculpture Center is pleased to present Statuesque on view from April 9 through August 21, 2011. Statuesque brings together a dynamic group of six international artists – Pawel Althamer, Huma Bhabha, Aaron Curry, Thomas Houseago, Matthew Monahan and Rebecca Warren – whose work reveals a renewed significance of the figure in contemporary sculpture. Featuring ten large-scale sculptures, this exhibition marks the Nasher Sculpture Center’s first exhibition to be presented outdoors. On view in the Nasher’s 1.4-acre Sculpture Garden, as well as in front of the Nasher on Flora Street, visitors will be able to see this new work within the context of the Nasher Collection, which includes a broad range of figurative sculpture from the last 125 years that serves as the foundation for much of the work in the exhibition. Organized by Public Art Fund’s Director and Chief Curator Nicholas Baume, Statuesque comes to Dallas from the historic setting of Lower Manhattan’s City Hall Park, where it was on view from June 2 through December 3, 2010.   ”We are very happy to add the Nasher Sculpture Center Garden to our repertoire of exhibition venues,” said Nasher Sculpture Center director, Jeremy Strick. “Statuesque is an especially appropriate exhibition to show at the Nasher, as its artists make work profoundly influenced by the modern masters represented in the Nasher collection.”  

“Long considered marginal in the contemporary art world, figurative sculpture has returned to center stage in the recent works of an international group of artists born in the 1960s and 1970s” said Baume. “It is clear that despite their highly developed individual styles, these artists share striking affinities. By turns visually playful, formally experimental, and viscerally charged, their works reinvent and extend the language of figurative sculpture for the twenty-first century.” 

Neither literal portraits nor traditional monuments, these works push the expressive potential of sculptural forms and materials. While the approaches and backgrounds of the artists are very different, their work shares a number of key characteristics. They tend towards abstraction over realism, assemblage over the readymade, construction of form over casting from life, and physicality and texture over refinement of finish. Their artistic references range from Ancient Egyptian and African sculpture to works by Michelangelo, Rodin, and Picasso. By turns colossal, complex, dazzling, and confronting, their impact is visceral, charging one of art's most traditional subjects with a renewed sense of expressive potential and contemporary relevance.