Duane Hanson: Sculptures of the American Dream

You may feel as though you have seen them before, in a movie, at the gym, browsing at a yard sale, meandering through the mall, or--more likely--on your trip to Florida. Duane Hanson's life-sized fiberglass and polyester resin sculptures are the spitting images of real, breathing people; they illustrate modern consumer society with equal parts tenderness, humor and horror. This revised edition of Hatje Cantz's best-selling catalogue raisonné, featuring two new essays, documents all phases of Hanson's oeuvre, from his earliest carved wooden replica of Thomas Gainsborough's "The Blue Boy" to the last works he produced before his death in 1996. Regardless of when the works were made, though, Hanson's remarkably lifelike sculptures will always be besieged by schoolchildren and jealously protected by museum guards, for they exude a uniquely magnetic force. Viewers and readers who dare to move in close are rewarded with details that could never be studied so candidly in real life: wrinkles, facial hair, imperfections. And yet Hanson's objective was never blatant voyeurism, but access to those things we prefer to overlook, to the drabness of everyday life and the ever-present intimation of mortality.