Semi-Reclining Dress Impression with Drapery (work of art)
Artwork Info
Key Ideas
- This life-size sculpture is part of a series of glass sculptures titled Absence Adorned.
- This sculpture was created using the lost-wax casting process. The process involves using wax and fabric to create a mold. Once the mold is created, the wax is melted, removed, and replaced with melted glass. This technique is also used to create bronze sculptures.
- Karen LaMonte is a contemporary American artist. She is best known for creating sculptures in cast glass, ceramic, marble, and bronze.
- LaMonte’s work highlights the shape of the human body. The sculpted dress has the appearance of draped fabric. This makes it look like someone is wearing the dress, but there is no human figure inside.
Learn More
Karen LaMonte is a contemporary American artist known for her sculptures, particularly her sculptures of life-size dresses made from cast glass. She studied at Rhode Island School of Design and later studied at the Applied Arts Academy in Prague, Czech Republic, after being awarded a Fulbright Fellowship. She created her first glass dress sculpture, Vestige, while she was studying in Prague.
Semi-Reclining Dress Impression with Drapery is part of a series titled Absence Adorned. This series includes a variety of sculpted glass dresses in different poses. While the dresses seem to mold to the shape of a human, the human figure is absent.
The sculptures are at once intensely physical – muscles and flesh strain against the clinging fabric – and yet insubstantial; the figures are absent, implied only by the shapes pressing against the clothing.
Karen LaMonte
LaMonte uses the technique of lost-wax casting to create her glass sculptures. This technique is traditionally used to create metal sculptures, but LaMonte uses it to create cast-glass works. First the artist creates a model of the dress using wax and fabric. She then uses the model to create a mold. Finally, the wax is melted out of the mold and replaced with melted glass.
The glass moves slowly, and it takes quite a while to fill the mold . . . Iron would be cast in 10 minutes maximum, the glass will stay up at the casting temperature for days, because the forms are very deep and there’s a lot of detail and the material just needs to flow slowly in there.
Karen LaMonte
There are similarities between LaMonte’s work and 17th-century baroque statues, like those made by the sculptor Bernini. Both her sculptures and Bernini’s statues use draped forms to highlight the shape of the human body.
Additional Resources
Resources for Teachers
- Read the artist’s bio.
- View more glass sculptures by LaMonte at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
- Watch a video about the artist’s cloud sculptures.
Resources for Students
- View another glass sculpture by LaMonte.
- Review step-by-step instructions for the lost-wax casting method.
- Read an article about baroque art.
Images
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Semi-Reclining Dress Impression with Drapery
A life-size, clear glass sculpture of a dress leaning back on top of a black box. The shape and position of the dress imply that a human figure is wearing the dress, but there is no body.