Duane Hanson

Wrinkles, facial hair, varicose veins, and fingernail dirt are hardly the bodily stuff of your average figurative sculpture, be it a Praxiteles or a Rodin. But Duane Hanson was never after the ideal figure, merely the familiar one, one so recognizable it is often mistaken for the flesh-and-blood waitress, house painter or cop it so vividly, eerily depicts in polyester resin. Clothed in the most exacting of detail, down to their hidden underpants, Hanson's sculptures compell an endless, prying looking into the folds and moods of his subjects. More Than Reality, the first catalogue raisonne of his sculptures, reveals that Hanson's objective was never blatant voyeurism but the opening of a view onto those things we prefer to overlook: the drabness of everyday life, the dullness of common states of mind, the inevitability of mortality.