Manuel Neri had been a prominent figure in the San Francisco Bay Area art scene for many years. His life-sized female figures and fragments of busts and torsos evoke a timeless quality which recall classical sculpture and the "unfinished" works of Michelangelo or partial figures of Rodin, yet his work is clearly embodied in Bay Area figurative painterly tradition. It is a dualism, if not a contradiction--a fundamental ambiguity--that sets this artist's work apart.

Source: Bulletin, May-June 1985.