I Am Mine, Without Permission

Ethan Cohen Gallery is pleased to present I Am Mine, Without Permission, the first solo exhibition of pioneering sculptor Carole Feuerman with the gallery. The exhibition brings together a focused selection of formative works spanning the 1970s through the early 1990s, many of which are featured in Feuerman’s recent publication Am Mine. The exhibition follows Feuerman’s recognition with the 2026 Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Sculpture Center (Pittsburgh, PA), honoring a career that has fundamentally reshaped the language of contemporary sculpture. While Feuerman is internationally celebrated for her iconic swimmers and monumental superrealist sculptures, I Am Mine, Without Permission returns viewers to an earlier and more intimate body of work. These fragmented torsos, isolated limbs, partial figures, and psychologically charged reliefs reveal an artist already pushing the boundaries of realism, embodiment, and feminine selfhood decades before such conversations became central to contemporary discourse. Created primarily during the 1970s, the works emerge from a moment of radical experimentation in Feuerman’s practice. Rather than presenting the body as idealized totality, she fractures and crops it. Hands clutch fabric. A torso presses through a wall. A body reclines, incomplete yet deeply present. Clothing becomes both shield and vulnerability. The viewer is denied the comfort of wholeness and instead confronted with physicality in fragments: intimate, sensual, humorous, uneasy, and defiantly human. At a moment when discussions surrounding women's autonomy, sexuality, and personal freedom were rapidly entering public consciousness, Feuerman approached the body with unusual candor. Many of these works challenged prevailing conventions of representation and were considered too provocative for widespread exhibition in their time. Rather than idealizing the figure, Feuerman presented bodies as sites of desire, vulnerability, intimacy, and self-possession. Viewed today, nearly fifty years later, the works feel remarkably contemporary, their originality and emotional honesty revealing just how far ahead of their moment they truly were. Works such as Hand on Bra (1976), Three Hands (1976) and Suspenders (1976), collapse distinctions between sculpture, object, and lived body. Several of these works also reflect Feuerman's close observation of the social transformations taking place around her. Three Hands, for example, originated as a portrait of a close friend and his partners, quietly acknowledging forms of intimacy and identity that remained largely absent from mainstream artistic representation at the time. Feuerman transforms resin, marble, silicone, lacquer, and oil into surfaces that appear startlingly alive, while simultaneously exposing the constructed nature of desire, identity, and representation itself. In many of the works, bodies appear caught between emergence and concealment, possession and autonomy. The exhibition’s title, I Am Mine, Without Permission, speaks directly to this tension: an assertion of selfhood, agency, and bodily ownership. Importantly, these works also demonstrate Feuerman’s early technical innovations within superrealism. Long before hyperreal figuration became widely institutionalized, Feuerman was pioneering new sculptural methods capable of translating flesh, fabric, moisture, and psychological presence into startling physical form. Yet unlike pure illusionism, her realism is never simply about replication. Beneath the virtuosity lies emotional complexity. The body becomes a site of memory, intimacy, vulnerability, performance, and resistance. The exhibition coincides with the recent release of I Am Mine, a publication devoted to this critical period in Feuerman’s career. The book features essays by six distinguished female art critics and historians —Gloria Moure, Leanne Sacramone, Victoria Noel-Johnson, Helga Marsala, Barbara Buhler Lynes, and Tone Lyngstad Nyaas — each offering distinct perspectives on the significance of Feuerman’s work and its enduring relevance within contemporary art history. Across nearly five decades, Carole Feuerman has remained singular in her ability to merge technical mastery with emotional immediacy. I Am Mine, Without Permission offers viewers a rare opportunity to encounter the origins of that vision: raw, intimate, fragmented, and profoundly ahead of its time. Carole Feuerman (b. 1945) is widely regarded as one of the most important sculptors associated with superrealism. Her work has been exhibited internationally and is included in major public and private collections worldwide. Feuerman’s work is currently on view in her solo museum exhibition Reborn Into The Water at the Heydar Aliyev Center in Baku, Azerbaijan, as a major public installation along Chicago’s Magnificent Mile titled Carole Feuerman: Moments of Stillness, and at the QCC Art Gallery.