Jesse Wine

Jesse Wine’s sculptures are at once introspective and autobiographical, while also speaking to shared human experiences. Often figurative, his works take the form of heads, limbs, and bodily fragments, driven by his interest in behaviour, communication, and the everyday. Although a sense of existential questioning runs through his practice, his sculptures carry wit and a playful surrealist humour.

For Sarvisalo, Wine has produced a new monumental bronze, Non-Fiction (2022). This large-scale work assembles limbs and geometric forms in a composition where connections remain suggestive rather than fixed. Now based in the United States, Wine reflects on the ideological and social contexts that shaped British modernist sculptors such as Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth. In doing so, he revisits their fascination with the abstract human form, exaggerating details like fingers and toes to create something at once familiar and unsettling.

Non-Fiction evokes a feverish hybrid of social realism and British modernism, exposing the fragile ideologies that underpinned historic approaches to memorialising human endeavour. A raised hand, a flexed leg, and an arched foot sit in dialogue with geometric cylinders and cuboids. At the centre, a shifting ‘body’ hovers between abstraction and figuration, its curves and protrusions suggesting shoulders, knees, spines, or waists, without settling on a single identity. By isolating the body from the face, Wine foregrounds gesture, posture, and other modes of communication.

His figures are often bulky and solid, their surfaces treated in ways that subvert sculptural tradition. He mixes sand into pigments to create light-absorbing matt finishes, or glazes large ceramics with graphite and verdigris to mimic the weight of metal. These material experiments transform the surface into a theatrical space where weight, meaning, and interpretation are continually in play.