tourists

 

                                                                                        queenie

 

                                                                                   young shopper

 

                                                                                  woman stroller

 

                                                                                    traveller

 

                                                                             flea market ve

 

                                                                                     man bench

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Background

Duane Hanson was born January 17, 1925, in Alexandria, Minnesota. After attendance at Luther College and the University of Washington, he graduated from Macalaster College in 1946. Following a period teaching high school art, he received a Master of Fine Arts degree from the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills in 1951.


Career and style

Around 1966 Hanson began making figural casts using fiberglass and vinyl. Works that first brought him notice were of figures grouped in tableaux, usually of brutal and violent subjects, somewhat similar to the work of Edward Keinholz. Hanson's Abortion (1966) was inspired by the horrors of a backroom procedure; Accident (1967) showed a motorcycle crash; and Race Riot (1969-1971) included among its seven figures a white policeman terrorizing an African American man as well as an African American rioter attacking the policeman. Other works which dealt with physical violence or other explosive social issues of the 1960s were Riot (1967), Football Players (1969), and Vietnam Scene (1969).

These works, cast from actual people, were made of fiberglass reinforced with fiber resin, then painted to make the revealed skin look realistic with veins and blemishes. Hanson then clothed the figures with garments from second-hand clothing stores and then theatrically arranged the action. Clearly these works contained strong social comment and can be seen as modern parallels to the concerns of 19th-century French Realists such as Honore Daumier and Jean Francois Millet, artists Hanson admired.


Collections

Around 1970 Hanson abandoned such gut-wrenching subjects for more subtle though no less vivid ones. In that year he made the Supermarket Shopper, Hardhat, and Tourists; Woman Eating was completed in 1971. These were also life-sized, clothed, fiberglass figures. Unlike the earlier works, however, these were single or paired figures, not overtly in a violent activity. Furthermore, whereas the earlier works tended to be more contained spatially, the later figures had no boundaries from the viewer. They quite literally inhabited the viewer's space--with amusing results at times, as in the cases of Reading Man (1977) or the Photographer (1978). Although detractors may liken his work to figures in a wax museum, the content of his sculptures is more complex and expressive than that normally found in waxworks.

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