Known for his expressive interpretation of the female body in both sculpture and painting, Manuel Neri created works on paper between 1978 and 1980 that reverse his usual working method. Here, his typical collaboration with a live model is abandoned for photographed poses found in magazines. Neri invents the bodies underneath the clothes by painting over the glossy pages. In some pieces, he obliterates any reference to the source image with his superimposed nudes, but in others, details from the figure or props show through to complete his compositions.

A member of the Bay Area Figurative School, which includes artists such as Richard Diebenkorn and David Park, Manuel Neri has been exploring the human figure in diverse mediums such as marble, bronze, plaster, graphite and oil-stick for nearly fifty years. In his graphic works as well as his sculptures, the balance Neri maintains between change and permanence, verisimilitude and raw materiality gives his work its striking vitality.