Mary Julia's Head

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. The present example comes from a moment more than a decade into their creative collaboration. Here, Klimenko’s head and shoulders are evoked with broad strokes of ink, charcoal, and colored pigments; her visage is a field of deep blue pastel highlighted with a touch of forest green on her left ear. The work bears the hallmarks of Neri’s best work: it combines the loosely brushed style and rich palette of his teachers Oliveira, Diebenkorn, and Bischoff with Neri’s own obsessive energies with regard to his favorite model and muse.