Among the greatest American sculptors of the late twentieth century, Frederick Hart was a fighter for figurative art. A passionate defender of hands-on art-making, he advocated for the representation of the human form, and championed the skillful use of materials. As if to pick up where he left off, artists now seem more interested than ever in exploring new media, reconfiguring realism, classicism, Romanticism, and modernity.
This legacy is perhaps best represented in the work of one of the greatest artists of the early twenty-first century, Kehinde Wiley. “Wileyʼs larger than life figures disturb and interrupt tropes of portrait painting, often blurring the boundaries between traditional and contemporary modes of representation.” His breathtaking figurative paintings and outstanding sculptures “quote historical sources and position young black men within the field of power.”
“In a series of seascape paintings, Wiley captures dramatic scenes of men battling perilous waves at sea and more contemplative and serene portraits of men on shorelines. Here the artist crucially replaces the bold patterned textile backgrounds of previous work with darker, more earthy tones that evoke the unyielding nature of the sea.”
“Wiley consistently positions his practice firmly in the realism of the everyday and draws inspiration from classical portraiture while appropriating the tropes of historical paintings to engage contemporary subjects. Selecting local young men from the rough areas of remote island nations, Wiley begins by photographing his subjects in the mirrored pose of a specific historical painting. These are ordinary men wearing their own clothing and, as with previous works, each one is valorised with the same significance as their paired historical source.”
Hartʼs appeal to “renew the moral authority of art” reverberates in the work of Wiley, as well as that of Marco Cochrane.
In “Truth is Beauty,” Cochrane monumentalizes woman in a posture of fearless freedom. At first glance, “Truth is Beauty” appears to be a classical, figurative sculpture, but it is more than that. It is “radically modern. Revolutionary.” Cochrane’s sculptures “are intended to demand a change in perspective. To be catalysts for social change. They are intended to challenge the viewer.”
He wants us to see what it takes for “both women and men to live fully and thrive,” and so Cochrane portrays Deja Solis, “who has always been self-conscious about her height, standing on her tip-toes, arms outstretched, and head thrown back, in a moment of radical self-acceptance and love.”
Amazingly, to assemble this enormous modern sculpture, Cochrane and his crew began with classical sculpting techniques, much like the techniques Hart used to sculpt the “Three Servicemen” statue at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, “The Creation Sculptures” at Washington National Cathedral, and the James Earl Carter Presidential Statue in Atlanta, Georgia.
To sculpt “Truth is Beauty,” Cochrane and his crew started with a life-size original, which they then enlarged to an eighteen-foot clay version, then the final metal form. Throughout, they used a pantograph, a simple enlargement tool sculptors have relied upon since the Middle Ages.
The completed fifty-five-foot sculpture is made of steel rod and tubing using two layers of geodesic triangles (requiring 55,000 welds). It is covered with a stainless steel mesh. For lighting, three thousand individual RGB LED lights are distributed throughout (lighting design by Ka- Ping Yee).
Sources:
The Dream 