Duane Hansen: It’s Alive!

Duane Hanson - Woman Eating - 1971 - polyester resin and fiberglass with oil and acrylic paints and found accessories - Smithsonian American Art Museum - Washington, DCAmerican figurative sculptor Duane Hanson (1925-1996) created lifelike figures made of cast fiberglass and polyester resin and dressed in everyday clothes. They often fooled the public into believing that they were viewing real people. Because of its faithfulness to reality, Hanson’s work is often categorized with that of the Photorealist painters of the same era, who based their paintings on photographic images.

Unlike the two-dimensional paintings, however, Hanson’s three-dimensional objects, life-size and realistic down to the hair on their arms, are uncanny in that they are simultaneously familiar in their lifelike appearance and yet strange as static works of art.

Hanson’s subjects of the late 1960s were political, including war, gang victims, and the homeless. Though he later tempered his political message, he continued to address the largely thankless roles of the working class—housewives, repairmen, office cleaners, dishwashers, museum guards, and janitors, whose bowed heads and vacant gazes reveal boredom and exhaustion.