Encantada I

NER-236-SC

Hackett-Freedman Gallery presents three stunning new marble figures by Bay Area artist Manuel Neri, June 3-July 31, 2004. These larger than life-size, three-quarter white marble figures on pedestals, Neri sculpted from his studio in Carrara, Italy, and recently completed in Benicia, California. The works, titled Encantada I, II, and III as a series of muses or contemporary allegorical figures, display Neri's mastery of this demanding medium, with areas of rough and polished stone and the unique forms that are his signature. These works also feature more distinct faces than in Neri's previous marbles.

Born in 1930 in Sanger, California, Neri is internationally recognized for his figurative sculptures in plaster, bronze, and marble, which merge contemporary expressive concerns with classical forms. Jack Cowart, formerly chief curator of the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., has described Neri's work as "the existential quest of beauty of the unfinished, the unfinishable."

"Neri searches to reveal not only physical realities, but also the inward emotional charge," wrote Cowart, for an exhibition of Neri's sculpture a few years ago: "Neri's figures are passionate flights in honor of making more profound human contact."

Manuel Neri has received numerous awards and honorary doctorates and has completed sculptural commissions for several public and private clients. His works are held in the collections of The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden of the Smithsonian Institution, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and many others.