Two artists whose fascination with the human form has taken them down opposite paths have been brought together by the Serpentine Gallery for their summer exhibition.
A retrospective of works by American sculptor Duane Hanson – lifelike replicas of working-class figures often on the periphery of society – is to occupy the Serpentine Sackler Gallery, while the largest scale show to date by the Turner-nominated painter Lynette Yiadom-Boakye will be exhibited in the main Serpentine Gallery.
While the work of Hanson and Yiadom-Boakye occupies the opposing realms of sculpture and painting and has been created in entirely different eras, the two are united by an exploration of the human portrait and the narrative possibilities it presents the viewer.
The Serpentine retrospective will be the first exhibition of Hanson’s work in the UK since 1997, a year after he died aged 70. The figures in the exhibition – all life-size and moulded from either bronze, resin or polyvinyl and painted in soft oils – span Hanson’s work from the late 60s to when he began on his final works in 1995, continually confronting viewers with uncomfortable scenes of poverty, brutality and isolation.
“Hanson has been overlooked in the UK for many years and has suffered from a snobbery and an embarrassment about realism in contemporary art,” said Rebecca Lewin, a curator for the exhibition. “I don’t think that attitude changed much throughout his career so hopefully this will give him the recognition he deserves.
“People want to be challenged and I think the fear is that works like this don’t challenge enough, when actually in a conceptual way these works teach us something about ourselves. You come away wondering more about the person sitting next to you on the bus, or the person that you pass on the street or even someone you see everyday that you don’t engage with.”
Hanson’s exceptionally lifelike figures caused much controversy in their time, having been first thrust into the limelight in 1965 with a work called Abortion, depicting a young pregnant woman on a table covered with a sheet. The sculptor’s preoccupation with making the invisible labourer visible again is referenced throughout the Serpentine exhibition, featuring works such as his piece Homeless Person 1991, depicting a dishevelled figure sitting on a wooden box holding the sign Will Work for Food, and his 1984 sculpture of a decorator in the midst of a job, simply titled House Painter.
It is also captured powerfully in Queenie II, a sculpture of a cleaner pushing a trolley and pausing in a moment of downbeat and fatigued contemplation. “For me this is one of the most engaging of the works,” said Lewin. “There is something more confrontational about her gaze and here, with some of the other works, we see Hanson playing with the viewer, making us feel as though we are walking into an unfinished exhibition and seeing a side that would usually be hidden in a gallery.”
Hanson’s desire for the figures to occupy the same space as his viewers, giving them a dignity often denied to the cleaners and manual labourers he sculpted, also means none of his works are displayed on a plinth. The sense of humour that often imbued the sculptor’s work is also evident in pieces such as his 1979 piece, Self Portrait with Model, where an overweight woman reads an article about losing weight in her left hand, while clutching an ice-cream sundae in her right.
Speaking about the motivation behind the retrospective, the co-director of the Serpentine Gallery, Hans-Ulrich Obrist, said: “There were so many roads leading us to Duane Hanson. There are so many working today who talk about Duane Hanson and with 3D printing, all of a sudden a new form of a realism is made possible in portraiture, so to revisit Duane Hanson in a digital age seemed very apt.”
Obrist also emphasised his belief that it was an important time to showcase the works of Yiadom-Boakye, particularly as she expanded her practice from painting into etching and even fiction writing.
The exhibition in the Serpentine Gallery, titled Verses After Dusk, shows a selection of the figurative oil paintings produced by the London-born painter between 2008 and 2015, with several pieces created specifically for the Serpentine show.
While Yiadom-Boakye’s pieces make subtle reference to works by Manet, Degas and Cezanne throughout the exhibition, they also feature exclusively black figures, a pointed reference to the absence of the representation of black history in the canon of western art.
The curator, Amira Gad, said the focus of the works was as much on posture and bodily positions, creating a sense of movement as her confident subjects dance, run and turn their heads with their backs obstinately to the viewer.
Gad added: “Each painting comes with its own enigmatic title,which encourages us to make up our own narratives about the characters that she paints. The people in her works are actually all fictitious and drawn from memory or scrapbooks – she never does any live painting – so by keeping both the landscapes and the titles evasive it is another way of her directing us to project our own imagination on to her work.”
- Duane Hanson and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye: Verses after Dusk will be at the Serpentine Galleries from 2 June- 13 September
