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Collection of the Lowe Art Museum, University of Miami
Football Player
Collection of the Lowe Art Museum, University of Miami
Collection of the Lowe Art Museum, University of Miami
Held by the artist. Administered by V.A.G.A., New York.

Football Player

Artist/Maker (United States, 1925 - 1996)
Date1981
MediumOil on polyvinyl, football uniform and helmet, bandage, Styrofoam cup and Astroturf
DimensionsOverall: 43 1/4 x 30 x 31 1/2 in. (109.9 x 76.2 x 80 cm)
ClassificationsVisual Works
Credit LineMuseum purchase through funds from Friends of Art and public subscription
Terms
    Object number82.0024
    DescriptionHanson, the son of a Minnesota dairy farmer, was trained in sculpture at Cranbrook Aacademy in Michigan, He arrived at his now familiar technique of casting in polyester resins reinforced with fiberglass in the mid-1960's. He casts his uncanny, hyperrealist figures from live models, using partial body molds, which he assembles and adjusts until the figure matches his conception. For Football Player, his model was a South Florida sculptor, Robert Thiele, who was also a professional athlete. Creating Football Player, with its meticulous details of skin and hair, took Hanson about five months. But it is not the realistic detail that is most important to him. "To me,” he says, "basically they're sculptures…. I want the whole thing to create a mood that comes through the forms when they're right." In choosing his models, he looks for "types that would be representative of a certain situation in life…. I always like bringing out the weight and the communication of a certain amount of heaviness that I find in our time -- a kind of sadness." Hanson sees himself not as a maker of shockingly realistic effigies but as a keen social observer, a creator of types as telling as those of Balzac, a documenter of his time, "with the warts." (All quotations are from an interview with Duane Hanson, by Paula Harper, Dania, Florida, August 1983.)
    On View
    Not on view
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