John De Andrea

Sidney Janis Gallery, New York

Acquired from the above in 1975

Sotheby's New York, 13 November 2003, lot 218

Brussels, Palais des Beaux-Arts, American Art in Belgium, 1977

John De Andrea, a leading figure of American Hyperrealism, emerged in the late 1960s with sculptures of striking presence that blur the boundaries between representation and reality. Two Young Women Nude, executed in 1971, belongs to this formative moment in the artist’s career, when he explored the human body with radical precision in its most immediate and unmediated truth. Executed in fiberglass with polychrome polyester and hair, the sculpture depicts two nude female figures reclining at life scale, arranged within a composition that is both closed and silent. The extreme naturalism of the flesh, postures and textures lends the work a quietly unsettling intensity, further heightened by the absence of any narrative or decorative context.

Far removed from any form of idealization, De Andrea offers a direct and almost clinical vision of intimacy, in which nudity is neither eroticized nor symbolic, but presented simply as a condition of existence. Two Young Women Nude fully embodies De Andrea’s sustained inquiry into perception, the viewer’s gaze and the materiality of the body, while engaging with the broader aesthetic and societal questions that shaped the United States in the early 1970s.