Existing comment:
Sculpture
The archive includes twenty-three sculptures cast between 1984 and 2019, many of which are featured in this exhibition gallery and on the first floor of the building. Oliphant, who has always claimed the modeling habit -- the ability to see and think in three dimensions -- was first inspired to make sculptures also seeing an exhibition of Rodin's work in 1982 at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.
Sculpture naturally extended Oliphant's graphic invention in light, texture, and physiognomic expression. Much as he imagined features in the clouds of configurations of lines coming from his pen, pencil, or crayon, Oliphant's modeling hand pressed into a block of warm wax in order to set before our eyes a three-dimensional caricature. His tactile constructions fuse the vitality of an animated surface with the mask of human expression. Like his drawings, with their seemingly casual lines, his sculpture is gestural, the presence of the sculpting hand visible in the strokes left behind in the wax.
These works play with the tensile strength of modeled forms to attain a range of expression from the attenuated limbs of George H.W. Bush playing horseshoes, to the tented hands of Clark Clifford, to the extensions of Richard Nixon's victory salute, to the stolid, compacted ramrod shape of Clinton as Billy the Kid or a hunched Jesse Helms or diminutive Jimmy Carter. They all come to life when the wax is cast in bronze at the New Arts Foundry in Baltimore, where Oliphant continues to authorize castings, including the Library's most recent acquisition: Barack Obama as an Easter Island Figure (2019). |