Self Portrait at the Modeling Stand
Casein, 34 x 25, c. 1955

Ben Solowey, sculptor. The description seems strange since he was a painter who showed his canvases alongside Picasso, Matisse, Redfield, and Garber in exhibitions around the country. His drawings, particularly his “theater portraits” for The New York Times and Herald Tribune, are known around the world. But his sculpture are known to a much smaller audience, although he won awards for his plaster casts and bronzes.

Eve
Plaster with stone patina

SCULPTURE BY BEN SOLOWEY features this relatively unknown work by Ben Solowey. It may surprise people to know that Ben produced a body of sculpture that can easily stand alongside his paintings. While the expression "Renaissance Man" is often bandied about, he really was one.

“When I first met Ben he had never exhibited his sculpture,” remembered the sculptor Joseph J. Greenberg Jr. “He said, ‘I’m not really a sculptor but I am fascinated by it.’” Ben’s modesty belied a through knowledge of classical statuary, an astute awareness of contemporary sculpture, and his own small but growing body of work.

Greenberg was just beginning to receive recognition for his sculpture, yet Ben wanted Greenberg’s opinions about his work a new medium. “He was just like a kid in art school,” recalled Greenberg in an interview in 1991, “even though by this time he was an established artist. He’d say ‘Now come on tell me the truth, is it any good?’ He wanted it critiqued and I could never find anything wrong with it.”

SCULPTURE BY BEN SOLOWEY, the first exhibition to focus on Ben's sculpture, features more than 35 pieces in plaster, bronze, wood, and wax that Ben created beginning in 1941. In his typical artist-craftsman fashion, Ben not only made the clay models with his own handmade tools. He made his own rubber molds, cast his plaster work and applied the finish patina much like he was working on a canvas, building up each layer of color to get exactly what he wanted.”

There are also studies of finished works to give visitors a sense of how a Solowey sculpture was created. In addition there will be studies for works left unrealized when Ben died suddenly in May 1978.