- Artist or Maker
- Manuel Neri
United States, California,1930-2021 - Title
- 2 Standing Figures
- Date Made
- 1964
- Medium
- Plaster and pigment over wood
- Dimensions
- Each: 49 × 17 × 18 in. (124.46 × 43.18 × 45.72 cm)
- Accession Number
- M.2020.251a-b
- Collecting Area
- Modern Art
- Curatorial Notes
Manuel Neri is best known for his life sized, figurative plaster sculptures, with worked and often painted surfaces. Along with David Park, Richard Diebenkorn, Elmer Bischoff, and Joan Brown, Neri is a leading exemplar of Bay Area Figuration, a movement that began in northern California in the 1950s in response to the then dominant Abstract Expressionist vocabulary in the United States; Neri was the lone sculptor of the group.
2 Standing Figures is a signature work from a prime moment in Neri’s career, with its tactile plaster surfaces and the loose application of paint on one of the figures. Despite the generic white plaster and lack of facial features and arms, these figures nonetheless feel quite specific, with quirky postures and idiosyncratic body shapes. This specificity is in distinct contrast to the idealized beauty of figures from classical antiquity, made of lofty white marble rather than ordinary plaster.