Woman Smelling Her Roses

Date: 1966

Medium: Acrylic, resin, and ink on cloth and wood

Dimensions: 60 x 24 x 42 inches

Edition: 1

Related Information

Public Collection:
Ludwig Museum of Contemporary Art, Budapest, Hungary; Long-term loan from the Peter und Irene Ludwig Stiftung, Aachen, 1991

Exhibition:
Poindexter Gallery, New York, NY, Paul Harris, December 20, 1966–January 14, 1967
Museum of Contemporary Crafts, New York, NY, People Figures, November 19, 1966–January 8, 1967
American Sculpture of the Sixties [traveling exhibition], Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA, April 28–June 25, 1967; Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA, September 25–October 29, 1967
Galerie M.E. Thelen, Essen, Germany, Paul Harris, 1970

Publications:
Brown, Theophilus. Paul Harris Sculpture. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000.

Remarks:

Chronology Excerpt:
“Tuchman selected four vibrantly colorful soft sculptures depicting women for the exhibition [American Sculpture of the Sixties, 1967]: Women Laughing (1964), Woman Giving Her Greeting (1964), Woman in Green Gown (1965), and Woman Smelling Her Roses (1966). In each, Harris’s female figures perform a routine action that suggests another person or thing (such as laughing, greeting, looking, or smelling). All but Woman Giving Her Greeting incorporates a patterned, rotund, and seemingly comfortable chair or chaise with which the figure’s simplified physicality coalesces. These early stuffed works are tableaus not unlike those of Marisol or Edward Kienholz made in through hard materials, and they anticipate the installation or ‘environmental’ work that these artists would explore over the decades from the 1970s onward. However, Harris would explore the relational and situational aspects in his soft sculpture, emphasizing a volume of form instead of an emptied-out, ‘hollow’ of object that Barbara Rose describes in ‘Post-Cubist Sculpture,’ her essay for American Sculpture of the Sixties.”
—Leah Triplett, “Interior Interests,” 2026.