Featured Artist
Gary Weisman
Gary Weisman is a teacher and sculptor from maquette through over life-size figures and horses, "notable for their energetic musculature and rich, patinaed surfaces." Until recently, Weisman had been a member of the sculpture faculty at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art since 1986. He then joined the sculpture faculty at Lyme Academy of Fine Arts, Lyme Ct. Rare among contemporary sculptors, Weisman performs every step of his art-making process by hand, from making the plasticine clay, figure modeling, mold making, and doing lost-wax casting in his personal found, to adding the patina. Weisman is also a member of the National Sculpture Society and is noted for his close attention to detail through all of the processes involved in creating his sculptures.
Gary Weisman is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including his most recent recognition - the 2023 Sculpture House lifetime achievement award from the National Sculpture Society. Earlier honors include but are 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.
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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 was recently featured at Stanek Gallery in the exhibition, "Untitled." The collection of bronzes in that show were his latest works. In this current body of work, Weisman brings together symbols of beauty, knowledge, and kindness with a unique perspective on the how these ideas can guide one to a place of shared appreciation.
Art is a conversation between the artist and the viewer, capable of spanning time, oceans, and language barriers. Weisman's art presents kindness as the bridge, a human expression with great power when those giving and receiving are open to it. His new works engage the viewer with options that represent the value of knowledge through the presentation of the apple. The beauty of the painterly patinas that represent light on his graceful figures evoke sentiments of enlightenment through giving and receiving. The feather has been known to represent many ideas including ascension, freedom and flight. Weisman uses the feather to represent the transition in his balancing figures.
Left to right: Holding ourself, 2023. Bronze on lacquered wood base, 21 × 16 1/5 × 10 in and Upper Feather Bridge, 2023. Bronze on black lacquered wood base. 32 1/2 × 16 1/5 × 11 in. Edition of 12. Inquire for Prices
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."