Carole Feuerman

Carole A. Feuerman ( b. 1945, New York) is an internationally acclaimed superrealist sculptor whose technically exacting, monumentally scaled figurative works have become touchstones in contemporary sculpture. Renowned for her swimmer figures—among them Innertube and The Golden Mean—Feuerman combines detailed surface finish with an architectural sense of presence, producing works that perform equally as intimate portraiture and as civic landmarks. Her practice encompasses indoor and outdoor installations, water-activated projects, and a recent series of mythological iconographies.

Feuerman began her professional career in the 1960s with drawing and paintings for The Rolling Stones, Alice Cooper and the New York Times. In the 1970s she began a series of fragmented wall pieces. In the 1990s her work became larger-than-life, cast in resin and bronze. Her technical mastery—painstaking modeling, and finishing—serves a conceptual agenda: to render bodies that register as living presences while prompting reflection on visibility, resilience, and collective memory.

Her work has been exhibited at selected major international venues, including Park Avenue, Central Park, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Palazzo Bonaparte and Palazzo Strozzi in Italy; the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C.; and the State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg. They are in the permanent collections of more than thirty museums and owned by the city of Sunnyvale, CA and Peekskill, NY. Distinguished private collectors include: Steven A. Cohen, William L. Mack, Glenn Fuhrman, Alexandre Grendene, former President Bill Clinton, Andrea Bocelli, and Malcolm Forbes.

Feuerman has lectured and given workshops at institutions such as the Guggenheim Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In 2011, she founded the Feuerman Sculpture Foundation to advance sculptural practice and public engagement with three-dimensional art.

In 2025, her Foundation started the Feuerman Sculpture Park at the Medici Museum in Ohio.

Recognition for Feuerman’s contribution to contemporary art includes the International Sculpture Centers Lifetime Achievement Award (2026), the World of Peace Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Arts (Athens), the EAWC’s Goddess Artemis Lifetime Achievement Award, First Prize at the Huan Tai Hu Museum (Changzhou), Best in Show at the Beijing Biennale, the Amelia Peabody Award, and the Medici Award in Florence.

Her most current exhibition MONUMENTS OF STILLNESS is a public installation featuring 10 – 12 monumental swimmer sculptures on Chicago’s prestigious Michigan Avenue.

Selected Artist Statement

“My work pursues a productive tension between fidelity and metaphor. I aim to render the human body with uncompromising realism—wet skin, glistening water, poised musculature—so that viewers encounter an immediate, almost tactile intimacy that then opens onto larger questions of identity, endurance and public life. Water recurs as a formal and symbolic element: as mirror, veil and agent of transformation. In recent projects the body is treated as palimpsest—tattooed surfaces and applied ornament become narrative fields where private histories intersect with shared cultural memory. For me, the hyperreal is not illusion but revelation: a means to reveal interior life and social possibility through meticulous craft and sustained empathy”.