Jonathan Shahn

Head on Long Pole on Base in Box

2008 

Plaster, glass, burlap and mixed media 

12 X 15 1/2 x 6 inches

BUY PRESALE       $3,500

 

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Courtesy of the Artist

 

Jonathan Shahn was born in Columbus, OH, and studied at Swarthmore College, the Boston Museum School, and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. He has exhibited extensively, most recently at Lori Bookstein Fine Art, George Billis Gallery, National Academy of Design, George Krevsky Gallery, O’Hara Gallery and Hackett-Freedman Gallery. Mr. Shahn has received numerous awards, including grants from the National Academy Annual Maynard Prize, the NJ State Council on the Arts, an Honorary Bogliasco Fellowship, and his commissions include the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial, for the MLK Jr. Station, Jersey City, NJ, and the Franklin D. Roosevelt Memorial, Roosevelt, NJ. His work is in the collections of the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC, Princeton University Art Museum, and Musei Vaticani, Vatican City, Italy. He has taught at the Tyler School in Rome, Boston University, the Maryland Institute, and the Art Students League of NY.

Jonathan Shahn’s work treats one of art’s oldest subjects, the human form. A sculptor whose work resists categorization under a specific school or tradition, he looks at and draws inspiration from the entire history of art. He embraces pre-modern, ancient, medieval, renaissance, tribal, and modern art, synthesizing their contributions in order to reexamine that omnipresent object of human social and reflective life, the human head. In so doing, he offers new ways of seeing the head. With a deft awareness of the importance of how the conditions under which the head appears to us constitute our mundane perception of it, Shahn plays with spatial limitations and lighting to help abstract the head from our everyday experience of it. His sculptures unveil the many manifestations of facial expression to reveal our humanity, but without strict adherence to any single artistic tradition, making his work representative of a kind of cosmopolitan humanism. Yet, by abstracting from normative experience, Shahn’s work is singularly a product of modern artistic questions.

For more works by Jonathan Shahn click here.