Mary Ann Unger (May 10, 1945 – December 28, 1998) was an American sculptor known for large scale, semi-abstract public works in which she evoked the body, bandaging, flesh, and bone.
Mary Ann Unger was a sculptor known for her large scale works with subtle expression, in which she evoked the body, bandaging, flesh, and bone.
These pieces were made of hydrocal, a lightweight plaster, over steel armatures, with surfaces that appeared scarred and scorched.
[5] That same year, Unger produced a site-specific installation for the Phillip and Muriel Berman Museum of Art at Ursinus College of Pennsylvania.
One has been described as looking like a dragon tail or a carrot with large conical breasts, while another is more like a cross between an arch, a stepladder, and a stretching gymnast.
[7] Unger's airy and grand monument known as Ode to Tatlin was commissioned as a permanent work in 1991 by the Aaron Copland School of Music at Queens College in New York.
The sculpture forms a gateway to the school in the shape of an ellipse sliced in half to leave an entrance in the middle.
[8] It was inspired by Monument to the Third International, a grand building designed by the Russian artist Vladimir Tatlin that was never constructed.
[8] It was meant to suggest staves of music and the supports of a rollercoaster with a swooping path that contrasts the drab and incoherent stretch of campus where it is situated.
[8] Critics were not fond of the sherbet colors of the painted slats of the monument because they found the excessive amount of sweetness almost sickening; however, from farther away, they acknowledged the power and splendor it emanated in its commonplace surroundings.
[9] With small outstretched arms, like the feathers or wings of some prehistoric bird, and a huge mouth open toward the sky, the sculpture suggests frantic desire and symbolizes both a cry of pain and a song of faith.
[10] It featured work by women who used the human figure to shape feelings of fear, loss, and pain and was inspired by Unger's own struggle with cancer.
[2] Pall Bearers is an allusion to the post-and-lintel construction method, with a horizontal member over an opening created by two vertical columns.
In the exhibition, “Dark Icons,” (New York, 1992) Unger was overcoming a bout of cancer that helped to broaden the metaphorical range of her work from a personal scream of victimization to a generalized but powerful meditation on mortality.
[12] The show contained seven sculptures, all made from steel armatures wrapped in plaster-soaked gauze, colored with pigment, wax, and graphite.
[12] Unger seemed to be aware of Baroque artists who struggled to show the weight of Christ hanging from the cross or the sag of his body draped in Mary's lap.
[15] Unger's subsequent solo exhibition at the Trans Hudson Gallery in 1997 featured five sculptures that display her strong interest in organic forms.
[16] Shanks consists of three nine-foot vertical bony shafts, each with a rounded point on the floor and topped with a bulbous knob.
[2] The sculpture exemplified Unger's inclinations – rational yet connected to nature, serene but passionate, rigorously formed yet playful.
Visual critic Cassie Packard, in a review for Frieze, asserted that this is “a long-overdue exhibition, sensitively curated by Horace D.