Nancy Graves

1939 - 1995

BiographyAmerican conceptual artist. While studying English literature at Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, NY, Graves received a fellowship in painting to the Yale–Norfolk Summer School. From 1961 to 1964 she studied fine art at Yale University, New Haven, CT, and in 1964 received a Fulbright–Hayes grant in painting to study in Paris. In 1966 she moved to New York, where she established a studio. Her first solo exhibition was in 1968 at the Graham Gallery, and later she became the first woman artist to have a solo retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Her work is founded on 20th-century conceptual discourses on art and draws on a wide range of sciences, including anatomy, palaeontology, anthropology, computer mapping, psychology and perception. Her curiosity for many subjects was a consistent feature in works that include drawings, paintings, installations, sculptures and film. She became renowned for her first figurative pieces, for example Camel VIII, Camel VI and Camel VII (1969; all Ottawa, N.G.; see fig.). These life-size, highly defined, handmade sculptures of wood, steel, burlap, polyurethane, skin, wax and oil, placed casually as if striding across the gallery floor, appear more camel-like than real camels and draw attention to perceptual problems of illusion and reality as well as to questions regarding the status and context of objects.

Later, using the lost wax technique, Graves cast delicate found objects in bronze, which she stacked, balanced and welded to create fanciful arrangements, figurative and non-figurative, large and small. Colouration ranged from brilliant hues in the 1980s to more subtle colours in her late works in the mid-1990s. Examples include Smile (Le Sourire) (1985; Budapest, Ludwig Mus. Contemp. A.) and Howling and Hissing (1992; New York, Nancy Graves Foundation). Throughout her career, Graves was open in her approach and exploration of the artistic process and conceptual boundaries in art.

Source: Oxford Art Online - http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T034150?q=nancy+graves&search=quick&pos=1&_start=1#firsthit

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