Swimmers (Carole Feuerman)

Realist sculptor Carole A. Feuerman’s human-figure sculptures express a refreshing perspective on the mundane but intensely personal activities of modern life. Her powers of observation and versatility find unique expression through various mate- rials that include marble, bronze, vinyl, and painted resins, while she incorporates both ancient and contemporary methods in the creation of her works. Swimmers: Carole Feuerman is a gorgeous and shimmering glimpse at transitory, contempla- tive moments in time, often captured in a veil of clear resin that replicates tumbling water droplets. In his astute and insightful essay, John Yau describes Feuerman’s exquisitely rendered figures as subjects “caught in a moment of transition that radiates an intense eroticism.” She evokes an inward life for her figures that invites our speculation, while revealing a mysterious chasm between them and the viewer that can never be plumbed. We cannot know their thoughts and perhaps that is exactly the point. Feuerman fuses the tactile nature of her sculpture with a visual verisimilitude that provides us a fleeting glimpse into private and isolated environ- ments—women stepping out of the shower, in the rain, or swimming—that sug- gest a meditative bliss. Feuerman’s museum retrospectives have included exhibitions at the Venice Biennale; the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC; The State Hermitage in St. Petersburg, Russia; The Palazzo Strozzi Foundation in Florence, Italy; and the Circulo de Bellas Artes in Madrid, Spain among others. Her work is fea- tured in public, private, and corporate collections, including Grounds For Sculpture, Trenton, NJ; the El Paso Museum of Art, El Paso, TX; the Bass Museum of Art, Miami Beach, FL; and art-st-urban, Lucerne, Switzerland. Her large-scale Olympic Swimmer was featured in the Olympic Fine Arts exhibition at the 2008 Summer Games in Beijing, China.