Using the pictorial languages of realism and illusion, the participating artists transform fragments of everyday life into legible narratives. Duane Hanson's ensemble of resting masons, Lunchbreak (1989), and a figure modeled after his own child in a moment of stillness, Child with Puzzle (1978), are installed with photographic works that reflect and complicate ideas of reality recorded and subjective, constructed composition.
Hanson's hyperreal human figures, often in mundane situations, have been compared to Pop and photorealism; instantly and innately familiar, they approach photography as three-dimensional sculpture can. Yet in their verisimilitude, these effigies of house painters, janitors, security workers and tourists evoke the intuitive pathos of confronting another human being.
Working against the dominant tendencies of abstraction and minimalism in his early career in the 50s and 60s, Hanson eschewed pure formalism, as the sociological aspect of artistic creation became palpable in his work through his concentration on the bare life of his subjects. Some sculptures, such as that of a museum guard installed inside a museum exhibition, deconstruct the "fourth wall" between artwork and spectator, making a normally safe and isolated encounter visceral.
In 2002, Sharon Lockhart created a photographic remake of Hanson's Child with Puzzle, and in 2003 she photographed Lunchbreak installed at Scotland's National Gallery of Modern Art. Lockhart, however, placed real people in place of Hanson's realistic figures, fusing sculpture-as-image with photography as a form of sculpture, and generating a dialogue between two- and three-dimensional perspectives. In both rooms of this exhibition, Lockhart's images of flesh-and-blood humans contrast perfectly with the physical weight of Hanson's sculptural figures.
In the first gallery, Thomas Demand's large-scale photography Ruine / Ruin (2017) is sandwiched between visions of Hanson's Lunchbreak. About ten feet wide, Ruine / Ruin is based on a news photo of a home interior in the aftermath of an air raid. Originally trained as a sculptor, Demand painstakingly reconstructed this scene of home life thrown into chaos, in minute detail, using paper and cardboard and destroying his model after photographing her.
In the second gallery, Hanson's Child with Puzzle sculpture and Lockhart's photographs of Lunchbreak each match their parallel representations in the previous room. Jeff Wall's Tenants (2007), a black and white image of an otherwise meaningless moment in a nondescript residential neighborhood, suggests a cinematic suspension of time in the desolate submission of everyday life. Andreas Gursky's Utah (2017) shows a stretch of highway and a blur of houses: a liminal space, part of the connective tissue of American society. Based on a photograph Gursky took on his phone from the window of a moving car, Utah is cinematic in its proportions, and the spontaneity of the image is dramatized by lines of abstract motion across the Utah mountains. The deft manipulation of the demand for light, shadow and sculptural reproduction to challenge our tacit acceptance of the information provided by a photographic image is reinforced in Parkett / Parquetry (2014), which shows nothing but a sun-dappled wooden floor: the floor of Henri Matisse's studio at the Hotel Regina, Nice, where Matisse worked on his celebrated late work, The Cutouts. In its understated calm, the interplay of wooden floor geometry, accentuated by the organic irregular shadow of an invisible tree, creates an illusory patterning system, transforming spontaneity into order.
Each of these works, documentary at first glance, is meticulously conceptualized and composed, creating a cross-media dialogue between photography and sculpture. In making visible moments that are often not seen, the works influence a shift of scale and perspective within the gallery walls, suggesting their visions of quintessentially American realities within imaginary interior landscapes.
Image: Sharon Lockhart, Lunch Break installation, “Duane Hanson: Sculptures of Life,” 14 December 2002–23 February 2003, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, 2003, the Broad, Los Angeles. Photo: courtesy the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels
