Sightings: Erick Swenson

April 2012
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Sightings: Erick Swenson
Erick Swenson’s first solo exhibition at Angstrom Gallery in August 1998 marked a watershed moment
for the artist. He had already started to make a name for himself as a member of the Good/Bad Art
Collective in Denton, a group of restless and forward-thinking artists from the University of North Texas.
One-man shows at DiverseWorks Art Space in Houston and Angstrom Gallery came before earning his
Bachelor of Fine Arts degree. The Angstrom show, however, marked his first solo exhibition in the city
he would call home for the next fourteen years. Entitled Obviously a Movie, the exhibition featured a
curious menagerie in a frozen landscape. Only three works were on display-an untitled sculpture of two
baboons in denim and fleece snow suits; two sweater-and-ski-mask-clad animals that reviewers identified
variously as dogs, “mink-like,” and “weasel-like;” and Edgar, a dandyish hooved anumal ill-suited for
wintry environs that invited attempts at identification as diverse as “ibex-like,” “deer-like,” and “either a
giant poodle or a smallish horse with a poodle haircut.” To complete the scene during the opening, plastic
snow fell from rotating PVC pipes mounted near the ceiling.
Obviously a Movie (Figure 1) introduced many of the elements that would become hallmarks of
Swenson’s work. The experience was more than a bit surreal: one was not entirely certain, on first
impression, what was going on. What exactly were those creatures? Why were they coiffed and clad?
What were they doing in this forbidding arctic zone, so far from their natural habitats? As with any
hallucinatory vision made believable, the devil was in the details: the toothy grin and curlicue poodle hair
of Edgar; the custom-tailored Fair Isle sweaters and ski masks on the little mink-dog-weasels; the sandals
on the baboons that accommodated their opposable toes. One could sense that animals depicted in the
sculptures seemed to be surrogates for human beings, eliciting a curiosity and empathy that might not
have been engendered by human figures. Although disparately placed and strangely matched, the animals
suggested a broader, loosely-related narrative. The dramatic presentation and title of the exhibition hinted
at the cinematic scope of the artist’s vision.
Since the exhibition, Swenson has received national and international acclaim for his beguiling
sculptures. He gained wide international attention when his work was featured in the 2004 Whitney
Biennial Exhibition at the Whitney Museum of Art in New York and his sculptures now grace the
collections of the Whitney, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, the Dallas Museum of Art, and the
Saatchi Collection in London. Rendered with incredible precision and a naturalist’s sensitivity, the works
often present fantastic vignettes of animals ensnared in strange, sometimes devastating circumstances, or
quietly poetic scenes that evoke the beauty and tragedy of nature, as well as the human condition. Often
shocking in their realism and precise details, the works take months, sometimes years, for the artist to
fabricate, making new work by Swenson incredibly rare. Sightings: Erick Swenson is the first museum
exhibition dedicated to the artist in his adopted hometown, and his first solo exhibition in Dallas since
Obviously a Movie.
The exhibition at the Nasher Sculpture Center features two sculptures fresh from the artist’s studio, and a
recent work making its Texas debut, that continue and expand the artist’s exploration of the human
experience through animal avatars. Ne Plus Ultra (Figures 2, 3), an incredible trompe l’oeil sculpture of a
rotting deer carcass, stands as a poetic postlude to a variety of sculptures Senson has made over the past
decade featuring deer. A series of untitled sculptures from 2000-2008 presented disembodied capes
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1. Erick Swenson, Untitled (baboons) and Edgar, installation view of Obviously a Movie at Angstrom Gallery, Dallas, 1998.
Photo: Elliott Johnson
2. Erick Swenson, Ne Plus Ultra, 2010. Acrylic on urethane resin, 17x72x54 in. Courtesy of the artist, Talley Dunn Gallery,
Dallas, and James Cohan Gallery, New York. Photo: Christopher Burke 2010
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3. Erick Swenson, Ne Plus Ultra, 2005. Acrylic on urethane resin, 12 1/4x16x14 ¾ in. Courtesy of the artist, Talley Dunn
Gallery, Dallas, and James Cohan Gallery, New York. Photo: Christopher Burke 2005
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4. Erick Swenson, Untitled, 2000. Plastic, fiberglass, steel flocking, acrylic, and paint, 91x40x40 in. Collection of the Modern
Art Museum of Fort Worth, Gift of Anne and John Marion, Acquired in 2002
5. Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Apollo and Daphne, 1622-25. Marble, height 9911/16 in. (243 cm) Galleria Borghese, Rome
6. Erick Swenson, Untitled (detail), 2001. Polyurethane resin, oil and acrylic paint, 132x84 in. Private Collection, Chicago.
Photo: Greg Weight, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Australia
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7. Erick Swenson, Untitled (detail), 2004. Polyurethane resin, acrylic paint, MDF, polystyrene, 23 1/2x 276x173 ¼ in.
Photo: Larry Lamay
whisking away small, white fawns (Figure 4). The works convey a palpable sense of helplessness at the
hands of unseen forces. Formally, the dramatic movement of the capes recalls the bravura of Baroque
sculptures such as Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s Apollo and Daphne (Figure 5). Daphne’s expression of shock
and helplessness, as she transforms into a tree at Apollo’s touch, finds an echo in the face of the fawn in
Swenson’s sculpture.
Several sculptures featuring deer concern provocative collisions of nature and culture. One, from 2001,
featured a young buck rubbing its molting antlers on an oriental rug (Figure 6). Like all of Swenson’s
sculptures, the level of realism is striking. The textures of the molting velvet from the antlers and the
incredible detail of the oriental rug, all exquisitely rendered in polyurethane resin and acrylic paint, detail
a scene that underscores the perennial clash between nature and culture. The buck is out of place and its
act feels transgressive, like a teenager mindlessly wiping dirt on his parent’s treasured oriental rug. It’s
just doing what teenage bucks do. In other works, such as an untitled installation from 2004 (Figure 7),
the result of the clash between nature and culture is not whimsical, but heartbreaking: an eight-point buck
lies half frozen in a brick road covered in a layer of sleet and ice, its neck twisted impossibly over its
back. The work documents a harsh truth of life in excruciating detail-the icicles hanging from the deer’s
antlers and hooves, the dirty slush, and the dark chipped brick road beneath it. It’s the same lesson we
learned in the movie Bambi (but without the fluttering eyelashes and cute bunny sidekick to make us feel
better): we are all mortal; tragedy visits us all; in nature’s encounter with man, nature does not fare well.
Ne Plus Ultra lays all of this bare and offers transcendence. Even from a distance, one can tell something
is amiss. The deer is prone and bare of fur, its skin is eaten away, revealing flesh, tendon and bone
underneath. Meat and gristle glisten in the light. Our curiosity gets the best of us, and we move closer.
Engraved on those stark white bones are old seafaring maps of waters and coastlines, some real, some
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imagined, beautiful and mysterious in all of their graphic detail. How on earth did they get there? It is
apparent that the maps continue under the flesh. Here we discover that scrimshaw, the art of carving
images into the bones of animals, is not an element of culture but of nature herself in the animal’s bones
as if from birth. As Swenson notes, “I like the idea that you’re forced to look at this horrible mess. This
is what happens in nature. But then if you don’t look past that and see all this beautiful scrimshaw work,
then you miss out on something that’s a little more… spiritual?” The phrase ne plus ultra, nothing
beyond this, was used on maps to indicate areas that had not yet been explored. In the context of the
sculpture, Ne Plus Ultra emphatically declares and end (there is nothing beyond this life), but the fact of
that end reveals a beautiful, poetic truth (life begets art, discovery, adventure).
Swenson’s sculptures are often momento mori, reminders of our own mortality in the guise of a fantastic
realism. In this way, they recall the Old Master tradition of still-life painting. Like Swenson’s sculptures,
Jean Baptiste Oudry’s painting of a dead crane (Figure 8) is not just a depiction of an exotic bird bound
by the legs and hung upside down on a tree trunk. Yes, we are to admire the beautiful plumage and the
extraordinary manner in which it is rendered, but the composition transcends immediate visual
impressions. The pose of the bird mirrors one that would have been familiar to Oudry’s audience-that of
St. Peter martyred upside down on a cross (Figure 9). It is in this composition that a still life of a dead
crane becomes a symbol of excruciating human suffering and spiritual transcendence. The other way in
which Oudry’s painting is like Swenson’s sculpture is in the silence of the moment shown. Oudry was
well known for dramatic portraits of exotic animals or scenes of the hunt, but Dead Crane shows the bird
not in glorious flight but at its quiet end, turning it from a nature study into a poignant meditation on
mortality and spirituality.
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8. Jean-Baptiste Oudry Dead Crane, 1745. Oil on canvas, 63 3/4x 50 3/16 in. Staatliches Museum Schwerin
9. Lionello Spada, Martyrdom of Saint Peter, first quarter of the 17th century. Oil on canvas, 91 3/8x79 1/8 in. State Hermitage
Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia
10. Film still from Un chein Andalou, 1929, by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí
A more recent precursor to Swenson’s work that perhaps offers fruitful comparison is Surrealist film.
Although it tended to emphasize irrational sequences, surrealist films were no stranger to symbolic
images, musings on mortality, and provocative juxtapositions of the poetic and the grotesque. Swenson’s
Ne Plus Ultra, in its disquieting combination of the brutality of nature and the beauty of art, recalls a
scene of the iconic film Un chein Andalou in which the rotting corpse of a donkey lays across a piano
(Figure 10). Where Luis Buñel and Salvador Dalí bludgeon the viewer with one shocking and
hallucinatory scene after another, Swenson choreographs his installations like a cinematographer, then
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freezes the film, allowing time for contemplation. Swenson’s preferred method of display, isolating an
object under a focused spotlight in an otherwise dark room, draws us through the dark gallery to the
object, where we can experience it in detail, like a film sequence that starts at a distance and gradually
narrows in for a close-up on a single subject.
Swenson honed his natural sense if theatricality while with the Good/Bad Art Collective. The group
staged two to three exhibitions or happenings a month in the Denton warehouse that served as their
studios, gallery, and playground. Their collaborative work typically took the form of elaborate and highly
crafted installations and performances meant to be temporary, but by 1997, they were being invited to
exhibit in museums and galleries. For an installation entitled Very Fake, But Real at DiverseWorks Art
Space in Houston, Good/Bad, overwhelmed by the immensity of the space, recreated their studio in
minute detail inside the cavernous gallery, reserving the space around it for a roller rink, and setting up a
stage for performances. The event lasted one night, and they tore down the entire installation the next
day. Another installation at the Arlington Museum of Art remained on view for a month. On the
mezzanine of the museum, the collective built a replica of a 1970s garden apartment, complete with
external siding and a dimly lit hallway connecting several apartments, at least one of them fully furnished.
During the opening, visitors received a key to one of the units where, upon opening the door, members of
Good/Bad met them with a personalized birthday cake, serenaded them with Happy Birthday, and took
their photo. All of the photos taken during the opening were posted on the refrigerator in the apartment.
The birthday party performance only took place the night of the opening. Visitors to the installation after
the opening had a vastly different experience. Instead of being welcomed with song and cake, they were
given entry into someone else’s empty apartment, where the photographs from several hundred “birthday
parties” were tacked to the refrigerator. Swenson, who was active with the group from about 1995-99,
has often called the experience his “grad school,” because of the high level of quality execution that they
all expected of themselves. Despite their temporary nature, the Good/Bad installations evinced an
extraordinary attention to detail, included distinct theatrical elements, and above all privileged the
experience of the viewer—all aspects that Swenson would carry over into his independent work.
Swenson’s dedication to the veracity of a work of art is extraordinary, and his working process supports
that. He has typically worked with a variety of industrial epoxies and resins, which can be unforgiving to
the uninitiated. Each new work of art usually goes through a period of research and development for the
artist to find the right materials and learn how to manipulate them effectively. For every pitch-perfect
detail in a finished work of art there are tens, if not hundreds, of failures and refinements that preceded it.
Swenson takes great care that his sculptures do not hit a false note and is therefore highly critical of the
results at each step, often creating an animal from the inside out to make it believable. Ne Plus Ultra, for
example, started with a complete deer skeleton purchased online (see process photos). Swenson and an
assistant then cast each bone in urethane resin and etched some of them with images of nautical maps,
using a sand-etching machine most commonly used to engrave names into wine glasses. With the help of
anatomical drawings, they then assembled to form the deer’s skeleton and used plastilene to sculpt the
muscles, tendons, and flesh. Once sculpting was complete, they made molds and cast the work in resin,
which they painted with acrylics and oils. The head (Figure 3), completed in 2005, served as the trial run
for the sculpture. The full composition took five more years, and the results speak for themselves. The
sculpture is exquisitely rancid, the rotting flesh appearing moist and greasy while the exposed bone is
convincingly desiccated.
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The two new works in the exhibition, Scuttle and Schwärmerei (Figures 11, 12), employ gastropods to
examine elements of the darker side of nature, both animal and human. In Scuttle, a large sea snail has
reached out and is in the process of crushing its own shell. This can be seen as an act of violent selfdestruction or desperate self-preservation: the title refers to the nautical practice of sinking one’s own ship
to create a blockade or prevent an enemy force from taking it.
In Schwärmerei, hundreds of snails—lovingly rendered in all of their squishy, slimy detail—swarm a
precise replica of a two-foot tall late-nineteenth century German ceramic beer stein. Piling on and
crawling over each other, the snails reflexively make their way to the top of the tankard. As most
gardeners know, snails are attracted to the yeast in beer, but will drown in it. Once inside, they will meet
their demise, abstractly expressed here by a deep chasm that disappears into the pedestal on which the
giant beer mug stands. The stein is placed at a height at which a viewer can peer into the abyss.
11. Erick Swenson, Scuttle, 2012. Acrylic on resin and MDF, 6x10x8 in. Courtesy of the artist, Talley Dunn Gallery, Dallas,
and James Cohan Gallery, New York. Photo: Kevin Todora Photography
12. Erick Swenson, Schwärmerei, 2012. Acrylic and oil on urethane resin, silicone and MDF, 53x24x24 in. Courtesy of the
artist, Talley Dunn Gallery, Dallas, and James Cohan Gallery, New York. Photo: Kevin Todora Photography
Although for years Swenson left his works untitled, he has recently begun to bestow his sculptures with
evocative names. Like Ne Plus Ultra and Scuttle, the title Schwärmerei succinctly captures the complex
subject of the work. An abstract noun literally meaning “swarming,” the term was invented by 16th
century German theologian Martin Luther to describe “a murky combination of utopian mass enthusiasm
and fanaticism” that late would be associated with the fervor that accompanied noth the rise of Marxism
and the National Socialists. Other, more current definitions include “excessive or unwholesome
sentiment” and :name given to a more or less insane enthusiasm with which a mass of men is affected.”
As we have seen time and again, whether in macrocosm (the Nazis) or microcosm (riots following
athletic contests) mass euphoria (occasionally fueled by beer) can quickly devolve into mob mentality. It
is at that point, Schwärmerei, suggests, that humanity falls into the abyss.
In the history of art, snails, or any mollusks for that matter, are a true rarity as a subject. The shells find
their way into still-life paintings, but the animals that occupied them are notably absent. Most cultures
have depicted animals as symbols of human traits. In the European tradition, dogs represented fidelity;
stags, pride and independence; lions, majesty and nobility. In some Native American cultures, snails
represent perseverance and determination. Swenson, however, does not employ animals as symbols.
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They are, instead, the primary protagonists. Their actions and predicaments, however, are strongly
suggestive of human travails. They are stand-ins for us, and we are meant to read them as such.
13. Salvador Dalí, Rainy Taxi, 1938. Installation view at 1938 Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme, Galerie, Beax-Arts,
Paris
One notable instance in which snails played a prominent role in a work of art is in Salvador Dalí’s Rainy
Taxi (Figure 13). Installed in the courtyard of the Galerie Beaux-Arts in Paris during the 1938
Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme, the work consisted of a taxi cab, lights on and covered in ivy,
outfitted with plumbing that “rained: on its two mannequin occupants. In the front seat was a male
chauffeur with a shark’s jaw as a head. Live snails crawled over the scantly clad female mannequin in the
back seat. Next to her lay a sewing machine and, on the floor, Pampas grass and other vegetation. As in
Schwärmerei, the snails are doing what snails do. They are not symbols, but part of the “natural”
environment of growth and decay inside the car. It is interesting to not that both Swenson and Dalí effect
a curious collision of nature and culture in their works. If Swenson intended psycho-sexual undertones in
Schwärmerei, as Dalí did in Rainy Taxi, he has achieved them in a far subtler manner. Schwärmerei
underwent a similarly intensive period of “R and D.” It took several months of experimenting to find the
right kind of silicone that could be cast and maintain the right level of density, pliability, and textural
detail, not to mention being able to take a painted surface finished that mimicked the natural moisture of a
snail’s body. Once the right materials were identified, then came the process of producing hundreds of
snails, in a variety of shapes and sizes, each one hand-painted in excruciating detail down to each tiny
eyeball. The shells were cast and painted separately, and later joined with their inhabitants. The stein
was relatively straightforward by comparison. A suitable example was purchased on E-bay, cast in resin,
and painted to resemble precisely the original (see process photos).
In an era when many artists subcontract the production of their work to fabricators or a studio full of
assistants, Swenson has for years done most of the painstaking research, production, and assembly
himself, helped only by one assistant, primarily Elliot Johnson, his friend from Good/Bad and an
accomplished artist in his own right. Rarely another assistant will be brought in as an extra pair of hands.
Such direct involvement at each phase breeds intimacy with the work of art and ensures not only the
quality of its manufacture, but also its conceptual rigor: the work of art must hold up as an engaging and
meaningful subject through the months—sometimes years—it takes to make. Of sculptors of the past
forty years who have distinguished themselves for the uncanny realism of their work—artists like Duane
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Hanson, Ron Mueck, John De Andrea, and Evan Penney—Swenson is the only one who’s work eschews
the human figure and examines humanity through animal surrogates. Swenson’s choices of subjects,
hands-on technique, and dedication to jaw-dropping realism distinguish his work in the world of art today
and translate into the kind of arresting, beguiling sculptures that will reward our consideration for years to
come.
-Jed Morse, Curator
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