Transforming the environment in which it sits, Duane Hanson’s Flea Market Lady, 1990, depicts an eerily lifelike scenario. In perfecting the most minute particularities of his work, Hanson was a sculptor considered to have been operating within the photorealistic realm, whose reaction-inducing oeuvre is exquisitely unlike those of his 20th century counterparts. Cast from hand-chosen human models, painted with skin-toned polychrome and outfitted in actual clothes, Hanson’s seductively deceptive sculptures are divested of any obvious artist intervention.

In an effort to cast light on the working-class population, Hanson exclusively represented the routinely forgotten and oftentimes disenfranchised members of society. As the son of a farmer growing up in small-town Minnesota, Hanson was intimately familiar with the livelihoods of America’s middle class and succeeded in illuminating their relatively mundane routines. Shown in her natural habitat, the subject of Flea Market Lady sits among her strewn-about garments supposedly being offered for sale, reading celebrity gossip in a lackadaisical posture unwelcoming of any potential customers. Hanson asserted that “the best sculptures should look unposed and appear totally unobserved” (Duane Hanson, quoted in Duane Hanson, exh. cat., The Saatchi Gallery, London, 1997, n.p.). As such, this installation candidly captures a mundane moment - one most common to ordinary life, but most readily overlooked. Hanson’s attention to these undervalued aspects of American life works to eliminate the cyclical generalization of the middleclass and carves a place for this population in art history. With meticulous observation to cultural tendencies and an unwavering dedication to detail, Duane Hanson has expertly combined themes of social commentary and precise sculptural artistry in Flea Market Lady.