$86,000.00

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69″ high x 84″ wide x 33″ deep

Karen Petersen, whose commissioned sculpture, in bronze, marble and steel, can be found on public sites and in private collections around the world, lives on a hilltop in Central Vermont.  There, in a studio that looks out on the White Mountains, she creates maquettes for small-scale and monumental work that is cast in the U.S., China and Thailand.

 

Many of Petersen’s large pieces are in park, municipal, academic and hospital settings in the Hartford, Connecticut area where, for 25 years, she was an Assistant Professor of Art at Hartford College for Women, a division of the University of Hartford, and where she established and directed the college’s Butterworth Art Gallery. 

 

During her teaching years she worked with fabricators in Connecticut creating abstract pieces in aluminum and corten steel.  As her focus shifted from abstract to figurative, bronze became her medium, and her work was cast by The Cavalier Foundry (CT) and The Paul King Foundry (RI), and, more recently, enlarged and cast at Asia Fine Art in Ayutthaya, Thailand and China Fine Art in Shanghai, China.

 

Her themes are mythological (the Inuit Sedna series), relational (Mother and Child, the Listening series), human and animal forms, and shapes in nature.  An abstract flower series which began four years ago explores the natural shapes to be discovered in plant life.

 

Petersen was born and raised in the small Upper Peninsula town of Escanaba, Michigan.  In the 1960s she studied sculpture and design with Paul Suttman at The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, graduating with a Bachelor of Science and Design. She later studied the figure with Chaim Gross in New York, modeling in clay; and she attributes her work in marble to the mentoring of Umberto and Ugo Antognazzi during summers spent in Pietrasanta, Italy.

 

She is also a painter of abstract large-scale oils which she considers the “music” of her spirit.

 

 

Petersen’s sculpture is carried by galleries in Nantucket, MA; Stowe, VT; Kent, CT; Taipei, Taiwan; and Shanghai, China.