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 materials 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, contemplative 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’sexquisitely 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 environments—women stepping out of the shower, in the rain, or swimming—that suggest 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, among others. Her work is featured in public, private, and corporate collections, including Grounds For Sculpture, Trenton, NJ; the El Paso Museum of Art, El Paso, Texas; 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.

John Yau is an American poet and critic who lives in New York City. He has published more than 50 books of poetry, fiction, artists’ monographs, and art criticism. John T. Spike, a noted art historian, author, and lecturer, specializing in the Italian Renaissance and Baroque periods. He is also a contemporary art critic. In 2012, he was named the assistant director and chief curator of the Muscarelle Museum of Art at the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia.

Carole A. Feuerman is a realist sculptor working in materials ranging from marble and bronze to vinyl and painted resins. Whether she is using ancient processes and materials or contemporary ones, her subject matter is the human figure, most often a woman in an introspective moment of exuberant self-consciousness shaded by erotic lassitude. Her exuberance is partially the result of rather ordinary circumstances; she has just stepped from the shower or is resting on an inner tube in a swimming pool.

From an art historical perspective, Feuerman is one of a small number of postwar sculptors who successfully rejected Minimalism in favor of the human figure. These sculptors faced a daunting challenge, which was how to make a freestanding sculpture of the human figure that didn’t appear nostalgic, and that didn’t look back to the heroic work of Auguste Rodin. The challenge is clear enough: how do you keep the figure intact without being wistful for that moment before Impressionism dissolved forms and Cubism shattered the world?