Collection of the Lowe Art Museum, University of Miami

Football Player

Artist/Maker Duane Hanson (United States, 1925 - 1996)

Date1981

MediumOil on polyvinyl, football uniform and helmet, bandage, Styrofoam cup and Astroturf

DimensionsOverall: 43 1/4 x 30 x 31 1/2 in. (109.9 x 76.2 x 80 cm)

ClassificationsVisual Works

Credit LineMuseum purchase through funds from Friends of Art and public subscription

Terms

Object number82.0024

On View

Not on view

Collections

Art of North America

DescriptionHanson, the son of a Minnesota dairy farmer, was trained in sculpture at Cranbrook Aacademy in Michigan, He arrived at his now familiar technique of casting in polyester resins reinforced with fiberglass in the mid-1960's. He casts his uncanny, hyperrealist figures from live models, using partial body molds, which he assembles and adjusts until the figure matches his conception. For Football Player, his model was a South Florida sculptor, Robert Thiele, who was also a professional athlete. Creating Football Player, with its meticulous details of skin and hair, took Hanson about five months. But it is not the realistic detail that is most important to him. "To me,” he says, "basically they're sculptures…. I want the whole thing to create a mood that comes through the forms when they're right." In choosing his models, he looks for "types that would be representative of a certain situation in life…. I always like bringing out the weight and the communication of a certain amount of heaviness that I find in our time -- a kind of sadness." Hanson sees himself not as a maker of shockingly realistic effigies but as a keen social observer, a creator of types as telling as those of Balzac, a documenter of his time, "with the warts." (All quotations are from an interview with Duane Hanson, by Paula Harper, Dania, Florida, August 1983.)
Visual Description

This hyper-realistic life-sized sculpture depicts a football player in a teal blue Miami Dolphins uniform sitting on a helmet atop an Astroturf plinth. The player, a big man with medium-light skin tone and brown curly hair, squats low to the ground, perched on a real white football helmet. He slouches forward with his elbows resting on his bent knees, a small Styrofoam cup in his right hand. Dirt and dust cakes his real uniform, curly hairs mat his forearms, and a sheen of sweat covers his face. The player stares at the ground in front of him, a weary or exhausted expression on his life-like face.