In general, sculpture is considered separately from painting. But there is one sculptor, Manuel Neri, who today at 91 can look back at his career as someone who was an important part of the Bay Area Figurative movement.

Another Gen 2 artist who was attached to the Beats and to Funk Art, Neri was nevertheless deeply influenced by his time as a student of Diebenkorn, Bischoff, Weeks, Oliviera and the work of the gone-too-early David Park. But Neri instead took the interest in the form and color three dimensionally.

Neri was from a Mexican immigrant family that had worked as laborers in the Central Valley. After a high school class in ceramics, and a course at the California College of Arts and Crafts, and a connection there to grad student Peter Voulkos who became his teacher and mentor, Neri served in Korea, and then traveled through Mexico with Billy Al Bengston (you see how the California artists begin to interconnect). Neri even invited Alan Ginsberg to read Howl in a debut of the piece.

He began by painting, but Diebenkorn thought he was a 'lousy painter' and that he should stick to sculpture. The early examples of his work are Picasso-esque constructions of wood and plaster, and very much in the vein of folk art. But Neri often decapitated his figures too, aiming for a kind of Greek archetype

He also lived with Jay De Feo who influenced him. "I'm a true romantic," he once said. But his more significant attachment was to come later as one half the power couple of the era with Joan Brown which provoked important exchanges including in this piece, Seated Girl from 1964 in a private collection and which sprang from a drawing of her. You can see the Parkian influence of color and shape.

Neri left the figure for a time but returned to it in the 70's and has devoted most of his career to this expressionistic form. He now also has fame as the father of Ruby Neri, another inventive sculptor.