The Body’s Voice. Carole A. Feuerman 

By Demetrio Paparoni

 The human body, whether fragmented or in its entirety, is the cornerstone of Carole Feuerman’s expressive pursuit. Through the portrayal of the body, the artist gives shape to her most profound dialogue with the contemporary human condition, whereby the surface of the skin is transformed into a complex map of meanings that reach beyond mere physical representation. 

A faithfulness to the idea of the body as a communicative medium — a notion central to the art of the 1960s and 1970s — creates a continuity between the artist’s early designs, the fragmented bodies from the beginning of her career and her more recent tattooed body fragments. This multi-stage journey culminates in her sculptures of bathers and athletes. For Feuerman, the body has a voice: it reveals inner states, it tells stories, it conveys its struggles, it offers a commentary on society and reflects the human condition. It expresses universal themes of strength, survival, beauty and transitoriness. It is also a body that feels, that experiences the world through the immediacy of the senses, managing to perceive facets of reality beyond the reach of rational thought. 

This is particularly evident in her sculptures of young women with their eyes closed, offering faint smiles, whose bodies emerge as favoured vehicles of knowledge. The centrality of the body is also evident in the relationship between the figures and the natural elements, emphasised by their faces turned upward in search of the sun’s warmth and by the water trickling down their skin. The tan marks and drops of water on the bathers reflect the need to physically connect with nature in moments of pure harmony. At the same time, these very traces left by the water and sun on their skin offer the viewer a sense of the context. 

The fragmented body that particularly characterises Feuerman’s works from the 1970s is not a diminished body. Paradoxically, its expressive capacity and central role in the artist’s poetic vision are strengthened. This stylistic choice, which align with the dynamics of postmodernism, allowed Feuerman to underscore the fact that the body does not need to be complete in order to be meaningful. This incompleteness thus becomes a narrative strategy that solicits the imagination of the spectator, transforming each fragment into a catalyst of meanings. 

At the same time, for Feuerman, especially in her works that reflect the social tensions of the 1970s, the body also carries political significance. In sculptures such as Lace Panties and Hand on Bra, from 1977, the female body boldly declares its right to exercise control over its own physicality. By transforming eroticism into an instrument for emancipation, the artist asserts her autonomy. 

For Feuerman, the body can also be dramatic, bearing the marks of its struggle for survival. In En 2-0278, from 1981, hands cling to a black inner tube, which acts as a makeshift float. The language of the hands is enough to express both a sense of desperation and the will to survive. En 2-0278 unfolds with its own narrative progression in Inner Tube, from 1984. This work, also characterised by a powerful realist effect, depicts an exhausted woman who entrusts her very survival to an inner tube. In these cases, the body becomes a theatre of existential tension, the site where the battle between life and death is played out. The centrality of the body thus also emerges from its ability to involve and represent suffering. 

In the subsequent passages, the inner tube transforms into an increasingly colourful and shiny lifebuoy, while the facial expressions, elegant swim caps and poses of the women suggest an alternative narrative and mood. Even the most serene bathers are conceived as survivors who have secured a brief moment of grace amidst the tempestuous sea of life. In both cases, the water — a recurring element — serves as a metaphor for struggles to be navigated, as well as a symbol of rebirth through the body. 

We find in Feuerman not only the athletic and harmonious bodies of the bathers, but also a body that can be a site of physical and psychological pain. Bubbles (1981), for instance, reveals this rawer dimension, which presents a complex and contradictory is still in the rough. Devoid of legs, she sustains herself on a block of sculptural material that has not yet been modelled. The reference to Roy Lichtenstein’s Girl with Ball (1961) is clear, although Lichtenstein flattens his image while Feuerman tends to accentuate its realist character. Both works draw inspiration from commercial illustrations. The image used by Lichtenstein for his painting from a 1955 advertisement for Mount Airy Lodge could easily be the same image used by Feuerman for her Beachball. At the same time, a comparison between the same sculpture and Pink Panther (1988) by Jeff Koons — a woman clutching a pink Panther — reveals how Pop, in its various declinations, never entirely disappeared from the realm of art. 

Though Feuerman also uses plaster for her sculptures, the completeness of the body and its true-to-life scale are not binding elements for her like they are for the hyperrealist sculptors. In most cases, she places her sculptures on a base, showcasing their nature as objects of art. Parallels can be observed between Feuerman’s works from the second half of the 1970s and Segal’s plaster casts of body parts, which the artist himself named Fragments. Segal’s Fragments were not originally meant to be displayed on their own. They were the remains of a process whose objective was to obtain a human figure in its entirety, to which a role was assigned within a narrative context involving multiple figures. Segal recognised an aesthetic value in “found objects” from his own studio and conferred artistic dignity onto them through a process of resemantisation. In contrast, in the 1970s, Feuerman immediately conceived her works as fragments. Therefore, while Segal, with a distinctly modernist stance, found himself assigning meaning to discarded materials in his studio and reappropriating them, Feuerman aimed to model her fragmented bodies not as parts of a whole, but rather as autonomous, self-sufficient figures to which she attributed narrative elements — the pattern on the panties, the hand that grazes the delicate hair, the position of a ballerina’s feet, the cartridge belt with the holster and pistol on a fragment of a seminude body or the presence of other hands that do not belong to those bodies all contribute to defining the narrative’s self-sustaining structure. 

In her series from 1981 dedicated to dance, for instance, the narrative is defined by legs with taut muscles, feet in the fifth position that don pink ballet slippers, hands that clutch a slipper in order to soften its point or fasten its ribbons or the bottom half of a body poised on its toes. These are anatomical parts that succeed in conveying the energy, strain and effort of the female body that we attempt to reconstruct mentally, as is customary with fragments of ancient statuary unearthed from archaeological sites. In this case, contrary to the fragmented bodies from the 1970s, it is not a matter of the remains of a work broken into pieces, but rather of parts carefully chosen for the energy they are able to emanate despite being swathed in a delicate pink satin fabric, as well as for their ability to evoke female power. The fragment elicits in the viewer a commitment to piece back together the totality of an image, generating an aesthetic experience that transcends the mere contemplation of factual reality and leads to a wider range of interpretative horizons. 

In 2022, Feuerman resumed her casts, models and studies — including the scrap pieces—using them for installations alluding to the stories of individuals who served as her models. After assembling them in display cases and letting them lie dormant in her studio for several years, she decided to use them for the realisation of a site-specific installation entitled Mitologie Individuali. Presented to the public for the very first time in this exhibition at Palazzo Bonaparte, in Rome, the casts of heads, hands, shoes and feet of different sizes were placed within a reticular structure of mirror-polished steel, which extends vertically. Realized in collaboration with Italian designer Marcello Panza, this structure was conceived by Feuerman in such a way that each surface holding a fragment does not hinder the view of the others. The entire arrangement should be perceived by the eye so that no element is obscured. Each body fragment alludes to the individual people with whom, during the process of creating the casts, the artist exchanged secrets and stories that have remained etched in her memory, as she herself has stated. Those monochrome — and in a way coarse — fragments that captured the most minute anatomical details of a portion of a body, of the weave of a cloth, of the curve of a lace, are potentially reconnectable to those secrets and stories, and their assembly gives rise to a fragmented, multi-voiced narrative. The body bears the marks of our stories, traumas, triumphs, defeats and changes. A scar can represent a moment of weakness overcome, transformed into a symbol of resilience within one’s personal mythology. An accessory, such as a pointed slipper or a swim cap, indisputably reveals something about the one who wears it. Tattoos also represent an attempt to rewrite one’s own corporeal narrative, to mark important passages in one’s life, to bring to light aspects of one’s personality or identity, to express the image one wishes to present of oneself or the perception one holds of oneself. The tattoo becomes a signifier etched onto the flesh, a way to say something about oneself that cannot be expressed with words. It is due to their ability to give voice to the body through their highly distinctive presence that Feuerman has included them in her sculptures, which are predominantly incomplete torsos and busts that appear to emerge from the walls. 

The ultimate protagonist of an artistic inquiry that places it at the centre of every reflection on the contemporary human condition, the body has provided and continues to provide Feuerman the opportunity to explore universal themes such as the search for harmony, the struggle for survival, the assertion of female identity and the awareness of existential fragility. It is the symbol through which Feuerman communicates the complexity of the human experience.