Though re-galvanized in his art, his marriage collapsed in acrimony in with Janice taking custody of their three children. Abandoned by his family, Hanson moved to Miami and started teaching at a Junior College. He noted that artists such as George Segal and Edward Kienholz were producing life-like figures that were making a great impression on him. Hanson started to produce visceral pieces in this vein, his first of note being Abortion - a white cloth veils a life-size version of a woman in the early stages of pregnancy - in He felt strongly about legalizing abortion and submitted the piece in the annual Sculptors of Florida exhibition.
The work drew strong negative reactions and lead to Hanson being banned from working on his sculptures in the College studio. This reaction didn't derail Hanson's ambitions, however. In , he made his first casts from live models and created works that made social and political statements. The writer Danielle James said of these early works, "[Hanson] experimented with sculptures of homeless people, motorcycle accidents, and politically charged subjects including a police officer kicking a black man and scenes of death during war [that forced] the viewer to play the role of helpless voyeur [and forced them to] see people in vulnerable and difficult situations without the ability to assist".
Works such as Gangland Victim and Motorcycle Accident were exhibited to public protest at the Bicardi Museum in Miami but Hanson was still finding critical and commercial success hard to come by. As James put it, "the nature of being more confrontational" made his sculptures "less inviting [because there was] less focus on the individual and their psyche than on the scene they find themselves in".
Hanson married Wesla Host, a schoolteacher from Florida, in and the couple moved to New York a year later. With a new marriage and in new surroundings, Hanson started to create what he called his "sculptures of life".
With these pieces he began to shift his content away from political commentaries towards the banality of contemporary American life. His new subjects were, in his words, "fatigued, aging and psychologically handicapped", adding that, "For me, the resignation, emptiness, and loneliness of their existence captures the true reality of life for these people [ With a new momentum around his work starting to build, Hanson caught the attention of the leading gallerist, Leo Castelli, who took some of his pieces in He also exhibited in a group show at the Whitney Museum of American Art in the same year.
London's Serpentine Gallery claims that his first foray into hyperreal sculptures, made of casts from real human bodies, was his late sixties piece, Football Vignette In he produced what would be career-defining works such as Tourists and Supermarket Shopper. These were rendered with the such heights of realism Hanson was being compared with America's emerging photo-realist painters.
Curator Imma Ramos has compared his figures to the religious polychrome sculptures of the Baroque period, but Hanson's realism was executed with such exactitude it gave his sculptures an added uncanny quality. In Hanson, who was by now featuring regularly at the O. Harris Gallery in Manhattan, featured in the Documenta 5 exposition in Kassel, West Germany, which brought him his first taste of international recognition. Wesla gave birth to their second child in and, in , he enjoyed, on the back of the Documenta 5 exposition, a hugely successful retrospective tour of Europe which included a six month spell in Berlin.
His change in fortunes also coincided with his mended relationship with his children from his first marriage. With his cancer in full remission, Hanson and his family escaped the claustrophobic setting of New York City and the fumigated studio setting and moved to Florida - New York is "more of a synthetic world; this is the real world" he said - where the artists spent the rest of his life. His work became more overtly compassionate, treating subjects such as fatigued waitresses with great empathy.
By now, Hanson was working solely in the hyperreal style with each work taking several months to complete due to the demands of achieving the required levels of detail.
Indeed, his revised outlook on life put him at odds with his early, more sensationalist works, many of which were destroyed in a studio fire rumored to have been deliberately started by Hanson.
His new audience became so beguiled by his uncanny characters that in the magazine Art in America reported on the new phenomenon of "Hanson Mania". Hanson rounded of the decade with the post of a Professorship at the University of Miami in Hanson had been using instant photographs as a sketching tool since the mid-to-late s.
As art critic Dan Piepenbring observed, he created over 1, Polaroids in his career which was his "medium of choice for testing the accuracy of his simulations, seeing if they passed the smell test [and] maybe tweaking the arc of an eyebrow or the pivot of a foot". Looking at the four angles in Car Dealer , for instance, Piepenbring noted "you can see him fine-tuning the man's ratio of desperation to blustery confidence: breathing life into a seedy stereotype.
The beauty Hanson spoke of breaks through". Moving into the s, Hanson continued to create his uncanny figures but with a sports-spectator theme. Harris Gallery, in New York's Soho district. In , Hanson began looking for a new way of making a critical statement about American society.
He moved away from violent subject matter of the earlier sculptures to parodies of American life. One of his early sculptures of this type, "Supermarket Shopper" , is a life-size pudgy woman in curlers with a shopping cart filled with junk food and TV dinners. Another sculpture, "Tourists" , is an elderly gentleman dressed in Bermuda shorts and Hawaiian print shirt, with camera gear hanging everywhere, and his wife dressed in red toreador pants and holding a plastic bag containing tour guides.
By the mids, Hanson's sculptures were less sarcastic and more compassionate. Hanson's sculptures become super-real. He used the natural poses of his models and then makes plaster molds of their bodies. He then makes polyvinyl casts from the molds, which virtually replicate the subject.
He then paints the figures, applies hair, clothing, and props to make the sculptures as real as possible. The clothing often comes from the person who modeled for the sculpture. Critics in Europe and America have linked Hanson with photo-realism. In , he had a retrospective exhibit in West Germany and Denmark. The characters within the art are passive, isolated beings, presented as victims of American society and negative values as much as the cause of them.
In the s Hanson created figures that challenged people's ideas about prejudice and social class. Hanson experienced both criticism and praise during his lifetime. In addition to receiving numerous awards, Duane Hanson was honored with the proclamation of Duane Hanson day, by Broward County Florida in , and in he was inducted into the Florida Hall of Fame.
Encountering a Hanson piece in a museum can be a shock because of the high degree of illusionism. That shock is in part due to the artist's impressive technique, but is also based on the recognition that the figure accurately mirrors us and the society of which we are a part. It reflects and informs. As Hanson once said, "Realism is best suited to convey the frightening idiosyncrasies of our time" Art News, March Monographs on Duane Hanson include M.
Bush, Duane Hanson ; and K. Battcock, editor, Super Realism ; Another study of super realism is F. Goodyear, Contemporary American Realism Since ; For an excellent broader discussion of various art movements, including super realism, see C. Hunter and J. Jacobus, Modern Art ; E. Lucie-Smith, Art in the Seventies ; and E. Lucie-Smith, Movements in Art Since
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