Born 1945, New York
Died 1998, New York
Mary Ann Unger was a celebrated sculptor best known for her large-scale works evoking the body, bandaging, flesh, and bone. She died of breast cancer in 1998 at the age of 53. Roberta Smith wrote in her New York Times obituary, “(Mary Ann Unger’s) works occupied a territory defined by Eva Hesse and Louise Bourgeois. But the pieces combined a sense of mythic power with a sensitivity to shape that was all their own, achieving a subtlety of expression that belied their monumental scale.” Mary Ann Unger's work is included in numerous private and public collections, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Brooklyn Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art,and the Albright- Knox Art Gallery. Her outdoor works are on permanent view at The Fields Sculpture Park at Art Omi, the Philip and Muriel Berman Sculpture Gardens at Lehigh University, and the Aaron Copland School of Music at Queens College, among many other institutions. Ms. Unger’s works have been reviewed in The New York Times, Artforum, Frieze Magazine, Sculpture Magazine, Art in America, and The Village Voice, as well as many other publications.
Founded in 2008, the Mary Ann Unger Estate works in collaboration with Davidson Gallery to increase the visibility and placement of Mary Ann Unger's work in public and private collections. The Estate exhibits a rotating collection of Mary Ann Unger's work at her former live/work space in the East Village.