Born and educated in New York, Josie Spencer studied sculpture in Florence, at the Academia del Sculptura with Antonio Berti. At Sarah Lawrence College, New York, she studied sculpture with Ezio Martinelli and art history with William Rubin, Curator of the Museum of Modern Art.
She then furthered her knowledge of sculpture and antiquities in Greece, Turkey, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, India and the former USSR.
Before becoming a student at the New York Studio School for Drawing, Painting and Sculpture; she studied anatomy and drawing at the Art Students League. She later became a Board Member and Vice-Chair of The New York Studio School . In the seven years before leaving New York for London, Josie exhibited at a number of group and one-person shows in New York at galleries in Soho and Chelsea. Her recent sculptures concentrate on women.
She works in her own West London studio.
Observations about Remnants of our Time by my brother and friends:
Josie's Spencer's work is a return to the most ancient and respected image - the human body interpreted with sure artistic technique.
In concentrating her work on the female form, she proves this inspiration is still as flexible and compelling now as ever. Her sculptures concentrate on a timeless conundrum: beauty's impermanence and fragility and the transience of the human condition.
The style is realism with a difference. The calm of Fragments, Furies, Women in their own Company all are seen threatened with destruction and dissolution, yet display great strength in their presence. They are, perhaps, the archaeological finds of our own time. The fleeting figure destroyed is still somehow immortal; in pieces, it still triumphs.
When the works are seen as they are meant to be viewed - "In Situ" - in nature or against a background utterly real and unartful, the message is reinforced.
DCS, Washington, DC
"As to your sculptures..I find them striking in their combination of elegance and brutality. The edges of the pieces seem to have been ripped away, while the figures themselves are in a completely different world- mostly serene, sometimes playful, but always unaware of the harsh edges of their existence.
I also particularly like the idea of suspending the bronzes by thin cables...it adds another dimension of contradiction." Guy Bradley, Provence,FranceIn Reply:
I think of these figures as though they were the sculptures that remained and were found, damaged, after the devastation of that proud city, Pompeii; not the people, victims of the volcano, but their sculptures that adorned the city and portrayed them. These figures are the 'Remnants' of our time.
