Manuel y Mary Julia Series No. 3

In the early 1970s, Neri met Mary Julia Klimenko, a poet who had begun modeling for him and a group of artists involved with the Bay Area Figurative movement. Thus began an intense relationship which extends into the present. Klimenko became Neri’s near exclusive model, resulting in numerous plaster and marble sculptures of her head, bust, and nude in full-length, as well as drawings and paintings of her over the years. This work is from a series of double portraits of the artist and his muse in which the egg-like visages of Neri and Klimenko emerge from fields of blank paper, dense charcoal, or swirling pigment applied wet. Almost primordial in form, these evocative drawings define the beginnings of an artistic relationship that would stretch for four more decades and beyond.