Recent Acquisition: Manuel Neri

The Nasher Sculpture Center is pleased to be the recipient of a landmark gift of work by American artist Manuel Neri. Donated by the Manuel Neri Trust, the five sculptures and ten related drawings represent the first works by the artist to enter the collection. Spanning Neri’s career, from the early 1960s to the beginning of this century, the gift chronicles the artist’s development and provides insight into his working methods.

A native of California, Neri spent his entire career in the San Francisco Bay area and was an important figure of the Bay Area Figurative movement with Elmer Bischoff, Richard Diebenkorn, Nathan Oliveira, and David Park. Working primarily in plaster, Neri sought to synthesize expressive representational and abstract modes, often painting his plasters and then carving away the painted areas. Early works such as Carla V exhibit a highly textured surface with varying planes of color. The application of color further animates and complicates the surface of the sculptures, drawing the eye in, and alternately obscuring or highlighting the texture. The result is a dynamic, abstract composition that plays out on the surface, yet is integral to the reading of the form. A related drawing captures Neri thinking through the form, as well as potential coloration.

Neri explored the expressive qualities of the figure throughout his career.  Plaster and bronze sculptures from the 1970s and 1980s examine the body in a variety of poses: standing, crouching, or in tension, hands and feet on the ground, holding the torso aloft. The status of the surface, and the relation of the figure to its support or background, receives intensive treatment in a series of life-size plaster reliefs, such as Arcos de Geso I (Diptych). Here, the figures, nearly fully formed, seem to emerge from and recede into the plaster wall, one figure looking toward and the other away from the wall. It is unclear if the plaster background represents a partition to a theoretical or imagined space or is itself a generative plane: the figures are as much a part of the wall as the wall is a part of the figures. The yellow pigment that covers both figures and part of the wall at once unifies them and complicates their relationship. The split composition, rough plaster, and unevenly stained surface give the work an aura of antiquity, as if they were mysterious fragments from ancient Rome or Greece.

Drawing and painting have been integral to Neri’s practice throughout his career. The ten drawings in the gift from the Manuel Neri Trust are all figure studies related to the sculptures, but exhibit a freedom and immediacy that marks them, individually, as powerful, autonomous works of art.

Manuel Neri’s work is internationally renowned and has been exhibited in major museum and gallery exhibitions both in the U.S. and abroad. It is also represented in numerous museum collections, including, now, the Nasher Sculpture Center.