Sumner Winebaum: Bits and Pieces in Bronze

Sumner Winebaum, Falling in Love, 2005, bronze, 9 x 12 x 12″.
Photo: David J. Murray.

Sumner Winebaum’s sculptures are meditations on the behaving human body. The small figurative sculptures in the AVA exhibition represent three series: Hands, Rubens (figures) and Antigravity figures. Common to each is a properly sculptural interest in weight and mass as the structure of an expressive language.

Him and Her is a bronze pair of figures that appear to be supporting each other. She leans forward with an arm braced against his back while he falls back toward her. Nude except for hats, the two figures manifest mutual dependency, or seem to. In fact they are not actually touching, nor do they even share the same base. Taut in their resistance to collapsing, the figures depend as much on their own antigravitational willpower as they seem to rely on one another.

That Winebaum often includes hats for the figures provokes a sense of whimsical playfulness, but it also underscores their nakedness, not an aesthetic nudity, but an exposed and confident corporeal courage. Finding the nexus of physical and psychological identity, Winebaum’s figures reveal their interior existence. The Antigravity figures lean impossibly backwards or forwards as though becoming what they can imagine themselves being. Such dreamed ways of being come from the realms of sports, circuses, religion and mythology, even engineering.

The Hand pieces have the feel of autobiography; large hands hold diminutive figures, supporting them with an affection a sculptor might have for his work. The Rubens series includes female figures with large physicality inspired by the baroque painter’s sensual nudes that were typically hefty bodies, but weighted lightly. Rubens painted them as graceful women, whereas Winebaum’s figures display a provocative actuality of weight. His figures press against the supports into which they relax. In Chair, a Hand sculpture that shares the substantiality of the Rubens series, a hand supports a tiny/large female figure, whose weight requires the muscular response of the hand. Cow Girl, (titled perhaps for the hat she wears), sits with organic forcefulness on a low wooden stool, her body a pyramid of massed flesh. This very knowing figure is unabashedly determined by the habits of nerves, muscle, fat and bone, the essence of physical being.