The Importance of Being Human

An 18-piece solo exhibition marked the opening of the Medici Museum of Art's new addition, giving Carole Feuerman's hyperrealist figures a fitting introduction to the space. The centerpiece, Monumental Quan, depicts a swimmer balanced on a large metallic orb and was installed on the museum's front lawn, where it has since remained as a permanent fixture, the first piece in what the museum now calls its sculpture garden. Feuerman, one of the founders of the hyperrealism movement in the 1970s and still the only sculptor working at this scale for outdoor display, described the piece as inspired less by her own biography than by a story that had simply stayed with her. That instinct, to let a swimmer carry a narrative that isn't necessarily her own, runs through the rest of the show as well, several works from which remain on view today as part of the museum's ongoing exhibition, Emergence.