LOSER: Neckar Doll

LOSER, by Neckar Doll, presents heartbreak, grief and sorrow not as emotional but anatomical. It lodges in the sternum, clenches the jaw, reverberates down the spine. A heart-shaped form constructed from vertebrae, a humeri and a femora, love rendered in skeletal terms. What remains when affection is stripped to the bone?

As ever, Doll’s practice is a choreography of collision between the visceral and the symbolic, the sacred and the absurd. Here, bones, vessels of mortality and strength, are bent into the soft contours of a heart. The gesture is both romantic and grotesque, echoing the raw physicality of heartbreak itself: a structure contorted, reshaped, yet unbroken. A body turned emblem.

There is no sentimentality in this offering. LOSER is not a mourning but a reckoning. By using human remains to fabricate a universal symbol of feeling, Doll foregrounds the violence embedded in tenderness. To love is to fracture willingly, as poet Traci Brimhall writes. Love is not merely sweet, it is structural. It holds us up, and when it collapses, we feel it in our bones.

In Doll’s hands, the heart becomes a fossil. Not metaphor, but relic. The sculpture channels the ruins of past emotions through the language of anatomy, affection turned artifact. At once a monument and a wound, this lone piece speaks to the paradox of loss: that even in defeat, something endures.