My Name Is Feuerman, Carole Feuerman

When artists get waxworks right, the results can be so stunning it’s almost impossible to tell them from real people. One such artist is American hyper-realistic sculptor Carole A. Feuerman, widely acknowledged as one of the world’s most prominent hyper-realist sculptors.

The models created by Carole are so realistic that people sometimes think they’re alive. Looking at some of her works, I really find it hard to believe that they are sculptures. They look incredibly lifelike!

Carole spends a painstaking six months on the waxworks to create the stunningly lifelike sculptures, with her hyper-realistic sculptures selling for as much as £250,000 each.

The Manhattan-based sculptor’s collection includes several female model waxworks in swimming costumes or bikinis.

The grandmother-of-two said her waxworks are seen as so lifelike that viewers of her work often refer to the models as real people.

She said: ‘My studio can take people by surprise, it is always littered with different body parts.

‘As my work is designed to look as realistic as possible, people often get a bit freaked out when they come in.

‘When I am creating and painting a sculpture, people refer to the work as ‘it’.

‘But when the piece is finished, people subconsciously start calling them ‘him’ or ‘her’ – they speak about my art as if they were real people.

‘Even with people who have worked with me for years, and are used to my art, end up doing it.

‘When designing a piece, I rarely base a sculpture purely on one person – most of my work will use the face of one model, the body of another and the arms and hands of a third.

‘I have sculptures that have been made up of body parts of five or six different people.’

Carole creates the amazing works by creating a mould, and making a resin cast out of liquid polyester, before using very fine sandpaper to refine the piece and to give the sculpture its lifelike skin.

She then spends weeks spraying hundreds of layers of skin-toned paint to the piece, attaching real human hair to finally bring it to life.

‘It is very time consuming but you can’t rush it – the longer it takes, the better it looks.

‘As we know the look of human skin so well it takes time to be able to get the sculpture realistic enough to trick the eye.

‘But the aim of my art is not just to make a realistic looking model – I am not trying to do what Madame Tussauds do and simply recreate life-like representation.

‘My art tells a story and I want the viewer to be involved and really feel the character’s emotion.’

Carole currently lives and works in New York, New York. Feuerman is most known for her resin sculptures painted in oil, but she also utilizes other media such as bronze and stone. She developed a technique she calls “painting with fire” where she pours, splatters and splashes up to five different molten metals that are 2000 degrees in temperature. Most recently she has introduced photography and video media as a component to her sculptural works and plans on creating more installations for 2011.

She is represented by galleries both nationally and abroad, and has work in many public and private collections all over the world. She has enjoyed six museum retrospectives to date, and has been included in exhibitions at, among other venues, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia, and the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence, Italy.

Among the notable honors Feuerman has received are the Amelia Peabody Award, the Betty Parsons Award, the Lorenzo de Medici Prize at both the 2001 Biennale di Firenze and from the City of Florence, and First Prize at both the 2008 Beijing Biennale and the 2008 Beijing Olympic Fine Arts Exhibition.

Her work is in the collections of His Majesty the Emperor of Japan, former President Bill Clinton and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, former Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev, Ms. Ariela Wertheimer, the Forbes Magazine Collection, and the Caldic Collection, among others.

Selected public collections include The Fort Lauderdale Museum, The Bass Museum, The Tampa Museum, The El Paso Museum, The Boca Raton Museum, The Lowe Art Museum at the University of Miami, Amarillo Art Museum, Queensborough Community College Museum, Brandeis University, Vin & Sprithistoriska Museet, and Grounds for Sculpture.