Shelburne Museum’s grounds are transformed into a pasture for Herd: Karen Petersen’s Bronze Horses. Eight primal yet powerfully shaped bronze sculptures grace the grounds in dialogue with one another, highlighting their striking and unconventional aesthetics. In search of beauty, Petersen strips away details such as manes, tails, and ears, distilling the horse’s form to its purest essence. Her sculptures are an exploration of the timeless allure of the horse, reimagining its forms through a seamless blend of ancient and modernist aesthetics.
For decades, Petersen has pushed the boundaries of equine art, taking a universal symbol of grace and strength and reinventing it in a minimalist way, avoiding decorative distractions, and instead allowing the horses’ softly sculpted forms to resonate with ethereal energy. This intentional omission of ornamentation reveals the raw, wild spirit within each piece.
Petersen achieves her bronze forms through the traditional and complex process of lost-wax casting, a challenging and rewarding medium that transforms molten metal into dynamic forms that embody both fragility and strength. Her masterful grasp of this medium, practiced over decades, allows her to bring contemporary relevance to an ancient material, creating sculptures that radiate timelessness and vitality.
Museum Grounds