Miniature Urban Sculpture by Alan Wolfson

Alan Wolfson has been creating miniature urban dioramas of grimy New York scenes since the mid-1970s. His intricately detailed scenes feature complex interior views with that takes several months to complete. The pieces are usually not exact representations of existing locations, but rather a combination of details from many different locations along with much of the detail from the artist's imagination.

Alan Wolfson never includes any people in his work, only things they have left behind - the graffiti, the trash, tips on a counter, a half-eaten hamburger, providing clues to a narrative. “The real impact of my work is not in how small everything is but in the stories these small things tell,” says the artist.

Wolfson uses wood, cardboard, paper, but mostly plastic to build his models. Anything structural is made out of sheet acrylic while anything that is detail is usually made out of styrene, which is a softer plastic you can cut with a knife or a razor blade. Some of the details are molded out of metal too, like brass hand railings, which have to be cut and soldered. Wolfson never use a magnifier because he finds them too distracting to work with.

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