Best known for his public monuments, American sculptor Frederick Hart maintained an intensely representational practice throughout the height of abstract and conceptual art. Hart first developed his fascination with the human figure as an apprentice stone carver at the National Cathedral in Washington D.C. In addition to traditional materials such as bronze and marble, he also pioneered the use of clear acrylic resin to cast figurative sculptures by embedding one clear sculpture within another. Hart often created reliefs and freestanding monuments that were integrated into religious and governmental architecture. An outspoken critic of abstract art movements and the shift away from absolute notions of beauty, he considered himself a direct inheritor of an old representational tradition in sculpture closely wedded to religion and moral responsibility.