Manuel Neri

Biography

Manuel Neri is one of the premier figurative sculptors working today. Born in Sanger, California, Neri began exploring new forms and materials in figurative sculpture and painting in early 1950s San Francisco. During this same time, Neri's peers—David Park, Elmer Bischoff and Richard Diebenkorn—were joining the lessons of abstract expressionism to their renewed interest in the human figure. Indeed, Neri's early sculptures closely parallel several seminal paintings by Park and Bischoff at this time.

Neri's naturally elegant, virtuoso style mixed with the raw materials and energy of "funk" art to make an explosive combination. To this day, Neri remains one of the few contemporary artists consistently devoted to the expressionistic figure.

Neri began sculpting in "junk"—burlap, wire, cardboard—and soon thereafter, in simple plaster. His lone female figures, often in frankly erotic or naturalistic poses, were lauded immediately for their contemporary yet timeless quality. From the onset, Neri made violent marks on the "skin" of his figures and then painted their surfaces in patches of bright color—a conscious bow, he has said, to the painted sculpture of Marino Marini and to the ceramics of Pablo Picasso, as well as to the visceral expressionism of Willem de Kooning.

In recent years Neri has worked in Carrara marble and cast in bronze which he then marks in paint, much as the plasters. These classic materials express the timelessness of Neri's forms, juxtaposed with the immediacy of his paint. He continues to work in plaster, as well. Neri's latest works are at once fragile, attenuated, individual and dynamic. His longtime muse and model Mary Julia remains unchanged. To this day, a lone, archetypal woman remains the vehicle for Neri's most ambitious formal and symbolic goals.

Artist Publications

Selected Works

Manuel Neri Untitled Standing Figure, 1957 Plaster 61 x 22 x 16 1/2 inches

Manuel Neri Untitled Standing Figure, 1974 Plaster, dry pigment/water, wood 67 x 22 3/4 x 14 1/2 inches