Featured Artist
Gary Weisman
2023 Recipient of the Sculpture House Annual Award from the National Sculpture Society.
Meet Gallery Artist Gary Weisman, the masterful bronze sculptor featured in our current exhibition "Three Voices," which reopens to the public on July 2nd! A teacher and sculptor of life-size figures and animals, "notable for their energetic musculature and rich, patinaed surfaces," Weisman has been on the faculty as a professor of sculpture at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art since 1986. He is a member of the National Sculpture Society and is noted for his close attention to details through all of the processes involved in creating his sculptures.
Gary Weisman is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including but not limited to an ARC National Sculpture Award, a Museu Europeu d'Art Modern (MEAM) Award, the Albert Nelson Marquis Who's Who Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Pennsylvania Academy Fellowship, Nepal Residency. Weisman has exhibited in galleries and museums across the country, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, and internationally, and his works are featured in permanent collections in the United States and abroad.
%20resize.jpg)
Labyrinth (detail) by Gary Weisman, bronze, edition 1/12, 17 x 16 x 12 inches. Inquire for price.
Drawing inspiration from Greek forms, the romance of the Italian Renaissance, Egyptian steles, and the works of Auguste Rodin and Constantin Brancusi, Gary Weisman creates historically inspired bronze sculptures that possess a contemporary dynamism. Weisman’s primarily nude forms reflect his preoccupation with the human condition and highlight the human body’s impressive capabilities.
Gary Weisman is one of three artists currently featured in our exhibition "Three Voices," his works adding gravity and depth to the collection. Weisman's sculpture is also on view in a special installation at The Graham Building in Philadelphia, showcasing the power of his life-size figures.
Like so many of our incredible artists, Weisman has been hard at work in his studio and foundry over the past several months. Get a sneak peek at his process, and a few of the fresh new sculptures he has been working on (yet to be cast!), below...
Left to right: Demi-God: Portrait of A Virus, and Feather Bridge, both 21 inches in stature, in clay state for bronze.
Inside the artist's foundry in Upstate New York, picturing various steps of the bronze pouring process.
Weisman was first drawn to sculpture for its ability to reveal itself immediately and simultaneously, like a gestalt. Rare among contemporary sculptors, he performs every step of his art-making process by hand, mixing clay and modeling, doing lost-wax casting in his foundry, and sanding and polishing in his studio. By paying astute attention to negative space, he crafts sculptures whose presences extend beyond their immediate forms and lend their surroundings a multidimensional quality.
"Everyone would probably agree: Art is not obligated to follow reason," reflects Weisman. "In fact, some would assert that art gains authority when its source is not reason; when it 'comes from the heart' or other clichés that assume an emotional, political, or illogical but provoking source for the art. This bronze sculpture asks that we experience art outside of reason and outside the cliché of emotions; that we not 'outsource art' to reason and emotions but experience art as an origin. My sculptural attempts, from maquette to over life size human figures composed in a compassionate naturalistic approach, ask us to abandon our preconceptions of space and gravity. But explanation is a pale shadow of the art experience.
"The bronzes do not speak of containment, but of participation. The figure is in dialogue with the surrounding space and demands acknowledgement of that space as an ontological factor; not as container. The figure does not exist outside that participation and as Gadamer states, the conversation never ends. The bronzes are the origin of a particular art experience claiming ground only in the immediate phenomenological relationships of art to viewer to space."