☻ In 1967, he made his first casts from living models, which inspired him to create more realistic sculptures. 

☻ In the same year Hanson created works that reflected the turbulent social time including War, Gangland Victim and Motorcycle Accident.  Gangland Victim and Motorcycle Accident were exhibited at the Bicardi Museum in Miami, which caused civic protests. 

☻ He began to focus more on individual people with a satirical approach, which can be observed in Race Riot and Football Players in 1968.  In 1969, Hanson moved to New York City and created more than 25 sculptures over the next four years. 

☻ His "sculptures of life" convey the emptiness, boredom, and loneliness of everyday life.  Hanson's work depicts the clichés of American lower and middle class-life.

☻ He transformed the reality of life into the realism of art.  We all come across Hanson's people every day life at the post office or gas station, or while walking in town. 

☻  "I'm not duplicating life, I'm making a statement about human values," Hanson said. "I show the empty-headedness, the fatigue, the aging, the frustration. These people can't keep up with the competition. They're left out, psychologically handicapped."

☻ Hanson's family and friends were often models for his sculptures. 

☻ His children Maja and Duane helped out with Children Playing Game (1979), Child with Puzzle (1978), Cheerleader (1988) and Surfer (1987).  Museum Guard( 1975) has the head of Wesla Hanson's uncle.

☻ In 1974, a retrospective of Hanson's work toured through Europe including Stuttgart, Berlin and Denmark. 

☻ The tour was a great success, and in 1976, his work went on a major tour of museums in America, which was also well received by the public. 

☻ A large one man show was held at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington D.C. in 1978 and at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City in 1979.

☻ In 1971, Hanson was diagnosed with cancer.  In 1995, he had a relapse, and died on January 6, 1996 at the age of 70.

Accident

Janitor

Janitors 1973.

Self Portrait with Model 1979

☻ Super-realist Duane Hanson uses polyester and fiberglass to create statues of people bearing such likeness to a real person it is uncanny. With the Supermarket Shopper, Hanson portrays a woman who has no regard for appearance as she is overweight, stretching her clothes, smoking and still in her curlers as she shops in public at the supermarket. Her shopping basket shows her disgusting over consumption which Hanson felt was a deplorable trait. While fully clothed, we still can sense the unattractiveness of this body. As most artists are seeking the ideal attractive body, Hanson seeks the ideal unattractive body. One female college senior exclaimed, "Wait, I saw her last week in the A&P!" The degree to which super-realists would go to make something look lifelike was unknown to art at the time, and Hanson not only makes you think the statue might be real, he made its context real enough that you take a second look

to see if maybe you did see that lady at the supermarket before.

Tourists

☻ Comments on the more crassly materialistic aspects of American middle-class life and the consumer culture.

☻ This work is a product of intensification just as much as simple observation – clothing and accessories are carefully chosen to magnify the intended effect.

☻ Queenie can be understood on one level as the personification of all those resigned-looking women who drag their bodies around in pursuit of the mess created by the rest of us.  But we are made to confront the fact that such women, who are usually invisible and ignored, are not just faceless

domestics. 

☻ Duane Hanson concentrated on the naked fact of the subject, an astonishingly persuasive counterfeit of another human being as a fully realised physical presence.  When describing this sculpture Duane Hanson said: ‘I like the physical burdens this woman carries.  She is weighted down by all of her shopping bags and purchases, and she has become almost a bag herself.  She carries physical burdens – the burdens of life, of everyday living.  But initially, it’s quite a funny sculpture’.

Duane Hanson’s hyper-real Old Man on a Bench is in a peculiarly modern predicament of drifting or simply existing, merely marking time on his way

from birth to death.

The Traveller snoozes sunburned and hung over in a pile of cheap luggage

waiting exhaustedly for a connecting flight home. 

☻ Duane Hanson’s sculptures of people are just too believable. Creating vignettes of real American life, he doesn’t forget a single detail. Casting his figures from live models in his studio, Duane Hanson then adorned them with every attribute of life-likeness from tiny body hairs, varicose viens, bruises, and hangnails. He hand picked their clothes from second hand shops, and accessorised them accordingly. 

☻ “I depicted people who are bored, fatigued or stressed by modern life, not just images, but experiences”

☻ Hanson blurs distinctions between art and life by holding up a mirror to society.

☻ Time magazine - “Hanson’s sculptures are the most grossly truthful pieces of social observation in American Art”.

Super-realism

☻ Photo-realists style – instead of being personal, deliberately rough and painterly, these works are impersonal, technically brilliant, impressive and so descriptive that they are often mistaken for colour photographs.

☻ Not well received with art critics when it emerged.

☻ American photo-realist painters often highly specialised – each confines him or herself to a particular range of subject matter.

☻ Some of the photo-realists shared Hoppers fascination with the melancholy ordinariness of American daily life.

Richard Estes