Hanneke Beaumont, Study for Bronze #93, (Drawing 133), 2010. Mixed media on paper, 29.1339 x 43.3071 inches. On loan to Vero Beach Museum of Art, courtesy of the artist.
August 28 — Dec 5, 2021
Lobby Gallery
In her cast iron and bronze sculptures, Dutch artist Hanneke Beaumont (b. 1947) echoes man’s perennial questions while raising more specifically contemporary issues. Many of her figures appear neither male nor female, neither young nor old. They do not appear as portraits of particular individuals, nor are they modelled after idealized human forms. Physically, they are approximations of human beings, and as such, they provide a way to consider, from a distance, general ideas about the nature of the human race.
Fascinated by her fellow Dutchman’s sculptural works, VBMA Senior Curator Anke Van Wagenberg invited Hanneke Beaumont to share her drawings for this special exhibition. The drawings help invite the visitor to follow the artist’s creative process and relate to Beaumont’s Bronze #56, in the Museum’s South Sculpture Park.
Like her sculptural figures, Beaumont’s figural drawings take on poses that are neither aggressive nor provocative and resigned. Fragile but strong, motionless but ready to move; the figures seem to exist in a weightless spatial equilibrium – their human character tied to a string of thought. Dressed in timeless “clothes,” partly structured material, intertwined with the body, they defy our perception without shocking our sensibility.