MUSEUM

Met Breuer
Life Like: Sculpture, Color, and the Body (1300 - Now)

Left: Willem Danielsz van Tetrode, Hercules, ca. 1545–60. Painted terracotta. The Quentin Foundation, London. Photo: Maggie Nimkin, New York. Right: Greer Lankton, Rachel, 1986. Papier-mâché, metal plates, wire, acrylic paint, and matte medium. Collection of Eric Ceputis and David W. Williams, promised gift to the Art Institute of Chicago. Greer Lankton Archives Museum. Photo: The Art Institute of Chicago / Art Resource, NY

On view at The Met Breuer, Floors 3 and 4, March 21 through July 22, 2018

Open March 21, Like Life: Sculpture, Color, and the Body (1300–Now) presents 700 years of sculptural practice—from 14th-century Europe to the global present—in an exploration of sculpture in which artists have sought to replicate the literal, living presence of the human body. On view exclusively at The Met Breuer, this major international loan exhibition of about 120 works will draw on The Met's rich collections of European sculpture and modern and contemporary art, while also featuring a selection of important works from national and international museums and private collections.

Just how perfectly should figurative sculpture resemble the human body? Histories and theories of Western sculpture have typically favored idealized representations, as exemplified by the austere, white marble statuary of the classical tradition. Such works create the fiction of bodies existing outside time, space, and personal or cultural experience. Like Life, by contrast, will place key sculptures from different eras in conversation with each other, in order to examine the age-old problem of realism and the different strategies deployed by artists to blur the distinctions between original and copy, and life and art.