Rebecca Warren March 26, 2011

Rebecca Warren's bronze sculptures are created in raw clay, cast, and hand-painted. She knowingly references the work of canonical male artists such as Auguste Rodin, Edgar Degas, and Willem de Kooning, as well as the cartoonist Robert Crumb. Deeply informed by the history of sculpture--from mystical prehistoric sources up to the present moment--her ambiguous, figurative forms disrupt entrenched notions of the classical ideal. Totemlike and "awkward," as the artist described them, the sculptures in their clay state are manipulated by hand, twisted, and built up, the wet, malleable material "fixed" in bronze and paint, defying the pull of gravity. The plinths on which these works rest are fully integrated into this sculptural ethos. Cast in bronze from a full-scale fiberboard construction and painted, they are intrinsically equivalent to the figures themselves. The emphatically vertical sculptures on the Bluhm Family Terrace are, in fact, forceful counterpoints to Chicago's renowned modernist skyline--itself dominated by works of the city's greatest, mostly male architectural masters.