Sharon Loper Northshore Sculpture Park

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Sharon Loper
Northshore Sculpture Park


Sharon Loper expertly assimilates Romanticism, Realism and Abstraction in her figurative sculpture. She investigates her materials and forms, avoiding stilted sentimentality, appreciating language communicated through the body. Her aesthetic embraces the idea of appearances revealed through the play of light on the surfaces like the impressionist painters, while her expressionist gesture introduces the presence of the artist to the viewer. A fluidity in the form and surface creates a seamless whole, while, paradoxically, a tension occurs between the quietness of the pose and the vitality of the surface. Each figure, conceived separately, lifted out of context, has a power of suggestion.

Loper's current body of work in bronze, primarily male and female nudes, has a sense of detachment, a fierce independence in their attitudes. The figures, alone, elongated, contained and graceful, speak wordlessly of complex internal emotional states, like performers in a choreographed ballet. Isolated, but not lonely, the figures do not invite companionship or a comforting touch. Although the images are recognizable, the art is fiction, a metaphor removed from the reality that inspired them, transported to another plane. Loper distills a humanization into line and texture to communicate content.

Sharon Loper ultimately creates a power of narrative voice in her silent figures. She embraces paradox and honors a human, organic wholeness with a poetic beauty as she straddles traditional, classic method of execution and contemporary psychological ambiguity.

Prepared by Marge Bulmer
Los Angeles


© Sharon Loper 2024