There is something uncanny about Sarah Peters’s brass-colored bronze busts of men, their hollow sockets and exquisitely coiffed hair and beards. Compressing a wide range of inspirations — from Assyrian busts to Constantin Brancusi’s idealized heads to life-sized sex dolls to sci-fi humanoid countenances — Peters’s otherworldly stylizations pull her work into unsettling places, where many different and even conflicting associations are stirred up. The disquieting oddness of her heads held my attention as I circled around them, recognizing their chilly, opaque presence, at the exhibition, Sarah Peters: Figureheads at Van Doren Waxter.
Along with the six large busts sitting on pedestals in the main gallery, two shelves on each side of the entryway display eleven black bronze figures and heads, the tallest of which is around a foot high. Radically different in scale, execution, and subject matter, these two bodies of work establish Peters, born in 1973, as one of the most ambitious and interesting sculptors of her generation.
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