British sculptor Rebecca Warren is most famous for her unfired clay female figures that straddle the line between abstract and figurative. Impossibly balanced, these ghostly white-gray figures are messy and raw, beautiful and disconcerting. I knew nothing of Warren and her work until recently, when her first solo American exhibit opened at the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago. My ignorance of her work led me to start my research—where else?—the Internet.

Rebecca Warren, Installation view, The Renaissance Society, Fall 2010

It was about 80 years ago that literary critic Walter Benjamin wrote that mass-producing art gave it freedom to travel; in his words, “it enables the original to meet the recipient halfway.” In an age where practically everything can be researched, looked at, or emailed with a few mouse clicks, art seems particularly accessible. Thanks to mass production, our homes and offices are now adorned with Matisse’s nude dancers or Dali’s melting clocks. Poster-sized reproductions of virtually any artwork can be yours for a small price. (Incidentally, Matisse would not have approved; he opposed decreasing the size of an original artwork). In many cases, technology—whether printing press or Internet—has enabled our only experience with that artist, or our most significant one.

Of course there’s something about an original work of art — Benjamin calls it the “aura” — that is captivating in a way that an image on a calendar or postcard or website can never be. In his essay “Little History of Photography,” Benjamin writes, “What, then, is the aura? A strange tissue of space and time: the unique apparition of a distance, however near it may be. To follow with the eye—while resting on a summer afternoon—a mountain range on the horizon or a branch that casts a shadow on the beholder is to breathe the aura of those mountains, of that branch.”

With Benjamin in mind, I did some research on Warren before viewing her Renaissance Society show, simply named Rebecca Warren (perhaps a brusque reminder that I should know who she is?). Thanks to technology that Benjamin could not have foreseen, I memorized images of her sculptures. I read online biographies. I watched interviews of her. I tried to get to know her work in every way possible before viewing it in person.

Rebecca Warren, Installation view, The Renaissance Society, Fall 2010

Warren was born in London in 1965, and was shortlisted for the Tate Britain’s prestigious Turner Prize in 2006. She says that her work can be “quite ugly, big, and physical,” and that they potentially leave her “a lot of room for embarrassment and shame.” Many of her clay sculptures look like unfinished, misshapen blobs with paint delicately smeared on them. Because she uses clay that does not need to be fired, it retains its rawness and still looks malleable. Artist and writer Neal Brown says that her work is “abstracted from the gravity of sensible analysis” and sees in it the “tragicomedy of life’s misshapen pleasures and problems.” One of the signature images of her solo show at the Renaissance Society is a rough-hewn bronze cube, maybe two feet square, on a wooden wheeled dolly. Contemporary sculpture is often provocative and difficult, but I found Warren’s work opaque and uninviting—academically interesting, perhaps, but not something I’d necessarily seek out in a gallery. Were these bronze cubes and misshapen clay objects really what Benjamin had in mind when he described the aura of art in terms of a mountain range on the horizon?

If the short answer is ‘yes,’ the long answer is more complicated. I entered the small gallery on the fourth floor of a building on the University of Chicago campus. There were only two other people there, including the student guard. In the relatively empty gallery, I was immediately drawn to two pieces—the bronze cube that I’d seen online, and a female figure very much like others I’d seen. Benjamin may have thought that mass-produced images destructed art’s aura, but without those images, I might have been consumed by my own skepticism and close-mindedness, unprepared for the inscrutability of Warren’s work. The clay female figure, called A Culture and completed in 2008, is about a foot shorter than I am. Her head is small, a bit larger than my two fists put together. Her breasts face one direction, and her sagging belly—with a belly button so far protruded it might suggest late pregnancy—face the opposite direction, and are grotesquely large in proportion to her head and waist. Curator Hamza Walker says in the exhibition’s essay that the clay figure’s “breasts, buttocks, hips, and thighs heed their own separate appetites.” I visited the gallery in the late afternoon, and the pre-sunset glow on the fourth floor shone on the figure’s swollen belly, highlighting bits of lint that had stuck to Warren’s clay. In that light, it looked like the belly was covered with soft downy hair, another feminine layer on the white clay. The excessively large breasts maintain the figure’s feminine curves even when viewed from behind. With the breasts and stomach facing in opposite directions, you’re forced to walk around the sculpture several times to get a complete image of it; the composite exists only in your imagination, or perhaps in that strange, elusive distance between space and time.

Rebecca Warren, Installation view, The Renaissance Society, Fall 2010

The bronze cube crouched nearby on the floor, forming a bridge between Warren’s imprecise clay sculptures and her exacting steel ones on the other side of the small gallery. It was tempting to try to pick it up to see if it was a heavy as it looked; instead, I knelt on the floor alongside it. It was less angular, less harsh, than it looked in photographs. Close up, I could see where Warren’s hands had been, where she had smoothed and re-smoothed each side. In its presence, you can imagine what even photography and film cannot see: the artist’s hands shaping it, the sensuality of an artist forming her work, the small thumb-shaped hollows. And so it transformed into a tactile, sensual object, not the harsh bronze cube depicted in photographs.

New York Times chief art critic Michael Kimmelman writes in his book The Accidental Masterpiece, “Panting and exhausted on the top of the second mountain I had climbed in two days in France, waiting for an epiphany that didn’t come, I realized recently how frustrating it can be to fail to see what others find beautiful.” Such as it often feels when you first look at art, especially contemporary sculpture, whether online or in person. But even if there’s no epiphany, sometimes the mountain range becomes beautiful on the way back down.