Nicole Farhi @ Bowman Sculpture

Nicole Farhi’s approach in her sculptures of The Human Hand was to make an ideal list of the people and their professions that she would like to depict. The largest number of models hail from the cultural world, with three pianists, a conductor, a flautist, a violinist, a ceramicist, a painter (Anthony Whishaw, the husband of her teacher Jean Gibson), and three ballet dancers. One of the pianists, Stephen Kovacevich, told Farhi that he can hear the notes of the Beethoven piece he was playing when he looks at her sculpture of his hand, a ringing endorsement of her capacity to catch the fleeting moment. For the dancers Farhi decided in two cases to include their arms, outstretched in a darkly patinated bronze in one, and delicately bent with an ethereal silver white patination in another. Far chose to cast the upright hand and arm of her ceramicist sitter into glass, a thoughtful connection to the sitter’s profession, since both ceramic and glass involve trial by fire.