Laura Ziegler

Over the course of an extensive career, sculptor Laura Ziegler has cast small-scale figures of a broad range of individuals, including acrobats, nudes, monks, and nuns, in bronze, polychrome marble and terracotta. Bringing vitality to her subjects through expressive gesture and form, Ziegler aims to capture their internal life: “I’m not really a figurative sculptor. I’m an abstract artist,” she says. “For me, subject is pretext; it is the form that I’m after.” Despite having trained in Italy—where polychrome sculpture gained more widespread acceptance than in the U.S.—and continuing to reside there, Ziegler has sculpted portraits of many well-known American personalities, such as Gore Vidal.