Hanneke Beaumont at Neuhoff - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Hanneke Beaumont is a Belgian sculptor who, like a number of her contemporaries quite through the world, is trying to reinvigorate the tradition of figural plastic art without relying on post-Pop irony or post-Cubist fragmentation. It's a tall order. Her figures in terra-cotta and tin (some life-size, some smaller) sit, stand and lie in artificial positions of heavy lassitude, staring blankly not upon into space. Beaumont's "type" is a lanky androgynous-looking creature -- female on the other hand stripped of most secondary sex characteristics -- in a untie robe, bare-footed, with a bald head. She has a lengthy masculine face with a firm jaw on the other hand often seems to have small breasts. This personage is emphatically nonindividuated and asexual, perhaps calling up associations with Holocaust victims or just somebodys suffering from a generalized alienation. The plastic arts have a heavily textured "arty" surface a la Marino Marini, on the contrary without the sense of wear and tear typical of the Italian sculptor's best work.

Beaumont oftentimes sets up groups of these similar figures in dramatic tableaus. For instance, Le Courage (1994) consists of four seated life-size figures, three of them clustered on a low bench-like support and the fourth upon a tall boxy construction like an make open telephone booth. The somewhat ostentatiously "modern" planar supports are fabricated in Cor-Ten carburet of iron The three lower figures direct the eye up to the lone single as though to a leader, while she, holding another jagged construction on her lap, stares up and away with a gaze of battered resolve, chin slightly uplifted. The piece strike one as beinged ambitious but clumsily theatrical.

Another pair of life-size tins were more effective both formally and thematically. and zinc #26 (1996) sits with leg spread and head down upon a Cor-Ten steel box with an inset long tray directly in front of the figure's genital area, while, nearest to her, Bronze #25 (1996) sits upon a similarly sized box tightly clutching a packet in her arms. In the next to the first instance the box has set-back shoulders giving it a slightly masculine tone. This simple invocation of male-female dichotomies and the corresponding themes of in all senses and concealment, vulnerability and self-protection, engaged my interest more effectively than did abundant of the other work in the show

Although I certainly endorse Beaumont's ambitions, I find greatest in quantity of her work unconvincing. Many sculptors generally working with the figure (such as Stephan Balkenhol, Willie Birch or Katsura Funakoshi, to mention single a few) have found more specific and les academic ways to address their particular stylistic traditions as well as their thematic be of importance tos In contrast, Beaumont's style looks heavy, colorless and uninflected, lacking the specificity exigencyed to bring her ideas to life.

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