Sunday 13 May 2012
Saturday 31 December 2011
Ephemeral Effects
EPHEMERAL EFFECTS source: Sculpture Today – Judith Collins
Certain contemporary artists deal with transience and decay, themes that underscore the provisional nature of our lives, our homes and our possessions. Artists have turned their attention to these matters before, but not usually in the world of sculpture. The transience of pleasure was a favored subject in European still-life painting from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century, especially among Dutch artists. The term 'vanitas' (In the arts, vanitas is a type of symbolic work of art especially associated with Northern European still life painting in Flanders and the Netherlands in the 16th and 17th centuries, though also common in other places and periods. The word is Latin, meaning "emptiness" and loosely translated corresponds to the meaninglessness of earthly life and the transient nature of vanity.) was used to describe memento mori (remember your mortality) of this kind, in which a range of objects (broken pottery, flowers, fruit, flickering candles and shiny bubbles) served as allegories of human frailty. The ultimate motif evoking the fragility of human existence was skull.
If today artists work with organic, ephemeral materials, it is done in the spirit of revisiting the work of artists from the 1960s, such as the Italian Arte Povera group and Gordon Matta-Clark who were among the first to use fugitive, natural materials for sculpture; the Italians used fruit, vegetables, animals, fire and chemical elements, Matta employed only food.
Jannis Kounellis - incorporated a gas flame, and animals named 12 horses 1969
Gilberto Zorio - Acidi 1985 - alchemical transformations such as evaporation and oxidation
Pier Paolo Calzolari - Homage to Fontana 1990 - lead, copper, refrigeration unit
Roger Hiorns - Vauxhall 2003 - rectangular sheet of steel anointed with a perfume
Dennis Oppenheim - Digestion, Gypsum Gypsies 1989 'the deer into furnaces, they are burning themselves up. In doing so they're digesting the room.'
Mario Merz - Spiral Table 1982
Anthony Gormley - Bed 1980-1- He ate his own shape out of the bread, leaving negative impression as thought he had lain there. He preserved bread by soaking them in wax, although this has not prevented the growth of mold. Bread is one of the staple foods of many countries of the world, and it is commodity that comes with its own particular social, political, economic and religious resonances.
Victor Grippo - Analogy I - Besides bread, another basic universal foodstuff is the potato. Grippo was trained as a chemist. He believed that the artist should act like a medieval alchemist, working to transform substances and ultimately societies.
Janine Antoni - Gnaw 1992 - large cube of chocolate weighing 300 kg and cube of lard, gnawed by the artist and than reused for lipsticks and candies. Antoni's act of gnawing aped the more traditional
sculptural practice of carving, which removes material little by little. With this work she was as interested in the sculptural process as much as the material.
Jana Sterback - Ctacombs 1992 - Partial human skeleton cast in high grade chocolate that is displayed scattered on the gallery floor. She said of the work: ' It renders (transient) the only part of our being that survives long beyond our life....It also raises the specter on cannibalism of necrophilia'
Egle Rakauskaite - Chocolate Crucifixes 1995 - She cast them from and existing crucifix and then laid over two thousand of them head-to-toe in a striking, formal pattern along the walls. These little chocolate figures of Christ provocatively merge the central icon of catholic culture with that of western hedonism , and make reference again to the Eucharistic practice of eating morsels of the body of Christ during worship.
Thomas Rentmeister - Nutella 2000. He works with sugar, chocolate and baby lotion. He poured 100 large buckets of nutella directly onto the gallery floor. The raction of visitors to the work veered between attraction and repulsion, because although it was made of something sweet, its form and colour recalled a mound of excrement.
Gay Outlaw - Dark Matter Redux 1998 (serpentine wall made from fruitcake in trench eaten by the local wildlife). Took a course in French cooking and used this training to explore ideas about materiality and mutability, working particularly with pastry and caramel sculptures.
Nayland Blake- Feeder 2, 1998. House made from slabs of ginger bread, which made reference to the gingerbread house in the fairytale of Hansen and Gretel, and to Uncle Tom's Cabin, both stories that he treasured from his childhood. Visitors to the gallery were overwhelmed by the sensual and oldfactory experience of the work; the were unable to stop themselves from breaking bits off the house and eating them.
Rirkrit Tiravanija -bacon-flavoured cirsps in two suitcases, invited the public to eat the work. Untitled(view) 1993 - ICA London, he cooked and served curry to the crowds who attended, selling vacuum packs for those who wanted to take the artwork home. Untitled (Free) 1995 - He transformed the back room of the gallery into a kitchen with a refrigerator, tables and chairs, electric hot plates, cutlery, cutting boards, woks and teapots. Bags of rice, spices and packets of bouillon cubes were the basic ingredients of a meal that was served to all who came during seven-week exhibition. Uneaten meals, the plates and cutlery remained unwashed and piled up in the gallery, and these deteriorated into a pile of smelly garbage.
Helen Chadwick -Of Mutability & Carcass 1986 ( a phrase from Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene 1590, in which poet writes about how all things are subject to change. Chadwick stated: 'My work is to do with the burden of physicality and sentience, and how desires and pleasures are very fleeting. How all human experience seems to be very frail, like a bubble', recalling the idea of the vanitas. A large glass column, Carcass (visible behind the golden spheres), was filled daily with food waste from her own street in East London. The column sprang a leak, flooding the gallery with foul-smelling fluids.
James Lee Byars - The Rose Table of Perfect 1989. 3,333 fresh and perfect red roses set in a Styrofoam ball. Most of his work was directed at examining the 'Perfect', probably an unattainable state on this earth, and works like this give evidence of this as they decay.
Anya Gallaccio- Red on Green, 2002. She also looked at the spectacle of entropy, and has come to the same point as Byars, but from a different path. She, too uses seductive objects like roses to demonstrate this. In works such as Red on Green, she arranges a large number of brightly coloured flowers in a geometrical formation on a gallery floor, sometimes covering them with a sheet of glass. The flowers progress from florist-fresh to shrivelled stalks, losing their colour and becoming smelly and mouldy, revealing the 'physical transformation of matter from artificial symmetry to artless disorder. Gallaccio has also worked with fruit, sugar and ice.
Damien Hirst- A Thousand Years, 1990.(uses living and death material to make its point about the life cycle; within a divided glass-and-steel vitrine lies a rotting cow's head infested by a colony of maggots, which hatch into bluebottles, only to be immediately electrocuted by the insect-o-cutor that hangs above.) Concerned with the transience of life and the permanence of death. He launched himself into London art scene in 1988 by curating 'Freeze', an exhibition of his own and fellow artist's work.
Wim Delvoye - Cloaca, 2000. He is interested in the scatological nature of man. In 2000, he collaborated with scientists at Antwerp University to construct a machine that he called Cloaca, which replicates the functions of the human digestive system, producing human-like excrement after being fed two cooked meals a day.
Piero Manzoni - precursor to the Arte Povera Movement, took subversive step in 1961 of tinning his own excrement and offering it for sale by the ounce, and works involving ideas about excrement usually pay homage to this.
Two sculptors who deal with the vanitas theme by using the form of the human body are Urs Fischer and Tom Friedman.
Urs Fischer - Untitled 2001- Life size wax candles in the form of unfinished female nudes, which self-destruct during their display as the wax melts and their limbs fall off. He feels that this is the age of a 'meltdown' of information, and his work in a way mirrors this feeling; he has spoken of wanting to make work 'that disappears into its surroundings'. He is also pleased to allow his work to escape from his control and follow its own path.
Tom Friedman - Untitled, 1999 - three-quarter size self -portrait, made entirely from stacked white sugar cubes which crumble slightly during display, causing a white penumbra to from around the figure's feet. The crystalline nature of the sugar is an ironic allusion to the crystalline nature of white marble, the material used by classical sculptors for heroic male nudes.
Xu Bing - Panda Zoo 1998 - he choose male pig, American York, and a female pig, a Chinese Changbai. The animals were breeder stock and, wearing panda masks, they were put in a pen and displayed. Bing intended the work to be a metaphoric manifestation of the differences between East and West, and the ways in which the opposing cultures try to interact.
Yukinori Yanagi - One Dollar, 1999 - consists of a US dollar bull sculpted in coloured sand, held inside clear plastic boxes. When the work goes on show, a colony of live ants is introduced to the boxes and for the duration of the exhibition they tunnel though the sand, gradually destroying the image. The ants' tireless labour undermines the symbol of American might, power and money. When the image has virtually disappeared, Yanagi releases the ants outdoors.
Rivane Neuenschwander - Spell 2001 - She brings to here work a delicate balance between the fragile nature of the material and the geometric, repetitive aesthetic order she imposes on it. This structure helps counterbalance the evanescence of the materials. For a handful of shows, she has spelt out the alphabet, filling the letters in with spices, from acafrao to zatar, and suffusing the gallery with a minglead aroma.
Cai Guo-Qiang - Project to Extend the Great Wall of China by 10,000 Metres, 1993.(western end of the Great Wall in the Gobi desert - smaller charges placed in intervals of 10 meters and larger ones at 1000 meters.) Wariety of works using gunpowder, which was invented in China as a by-product of alchemy. He was attracted to the unpredictable energy of the medium, with its destructive and constructive natures, and probably bad a little knowledge of Takis's work with fireworks when he began his own experiments. He has used gunpowder to make paintings, and also huge outdoors projects.Twenty years before Guo-Qiang , Roman Signer began to work with explosive materials - Water Boots 1986. His favorite materials are water, fire and air, as well as time, and he is a master in working with dynamite. Presentation of an exploding umbrella, which shoots up tho the gallery ceiling and remains there without blowing up the rest of the building.
Giuseppe Gabellone - Untitled 1999- He makes both, minimal structures and earthy, biomorphic sculptures, which he photographs, but after clicking the shutter he usually destroys them. The photograph on the gallery wall records the absence of a presence. Gabellone denies the viewer a direct encounter with the work, offering instead a flat image, which is more often the way in which we experience sculpture. in this time of virtual reality, he asks the gallery viewer to consider which work is more real: the photograph on the non-existent sculpture.
Certain contemporary artists deal with transience and decay, themes that underscore the provisional nature of our lives, our homes and our possessions. Artists have turned their attention to these matters before, but not usually in the world of sculpture. The transience of pleasure was a favored subject in European still-life painting from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century, especially among Dutch artists. The term 'vanitas' (In the arts, vanitas is a type of symbolic work of art especially associated with Northern European still life painting in Flanders and the Netherlands in the 16th and 17th centuries, though also common in other places and periods. The word is Latin, meaning "emptiness" and loosely translated corresponds to the meaninglessness of earthly life and the transient nature of vanity.) was used to describe memento mori (remember your mortality) of this kind, in which a range of objects (broken pottery, flowers, fruit, flickering candles and shiny bubbles) served as allegories of human frailty. The ultimate motif evoking the fragility of human existence was skull.
If today artists work with organic, ephemeral materials, it is done in the spirit of revisiting the work of artists from the 1960s, such as the Italian Arte Povera group and Gordon Matta-Clark who were among the first to use fugitive, natural materials for sculpture; the Italians used fruit, vegetables, animals, fire and chemical elements, Matta employed only food.
Jannis Kounellis - incorporated a gas flame, and animals named 12 horses 1969
Gilberto Zorio - Acidi 1985 - alchemical transformations such as evaporation and oxidation
Pier Paolo Calzolari - Homage to Fontana 1990 - lead, copper, refrigeration unit
Roger Hiorns - Vauxhall 2003 - rectangular sheet of steel anointed with a perfume
Dennis Oppenheim - Digestion, Gypsum Gypsies 1989 'the deer into furnaces, they are burning themselves up. In doing so they're digesting the room.'
Mario Merz - Spiral Table 1982
Anthony Gormley - Bed 1980-1- He ate his own shape out of the bread, leaving negative impression as thought he had lain there. He preserved bread by soaking them in wax, although this has not prevented the growth of mold. Bread is one of the staple foods of many countries of the world, and it is commodity that comes with its own particular social, political, economic and religious resonances.
Victor Grippo - Analogy I - Besides bread, another basic universal foodstuff is the potato. Grippo was trained as a chemist. He believed that the artist should act like a medieval alchemist, working to transform substances and ultimately societies.
Janine Antoni - Gnaw 1992 - large cube of chocolate weighing 300 kg and cube of lard, gnawed by the artist and than reused for lipsticks and candies. Antoni's act of gnawing aped the more traditional
sculptural practice of carving, which removes material little by little. With this work she was as interested in the sculptural process as much as the material.
Jana Sterback - Ctacombs 1992 - Partial human skeleton cast in high grade chocolate that is displayed scattered on the gallery floor. She said of the work: ' It renders (transient) the only part of our being that survives long beyond our life....It also raises the specter on cannibalism of necrophilia'
Egle Rakauskaite - Chocolate Crucifixes 1995 - She cast them from and existing crucifix and then laid over two thousand of them head-to-toe in a striking, formal pattern along the walls. These little chocolate figures of Christ provocatively merge the central icon of catholic culture with that of western hedonism , and make reference again to the Eucharistic practice of eating morsels of the body of Christ during worship.
Thomas Rentmeister - Nutella 2000. He works with sugar, chocolate and baby lotion. He poured 100 large buckets of nutella directly onto the gallery floor. The raction of visitors to the work veered between attraction and repulsion, because although it was made of something sweet, its form and colour recalled a mound of excrement.
Gay Outlaw - Dark Matter Redux 1998 (serpentine wall made from fruitcake in trench eaten by the local wildlife). Took a course in French cooking and used this training to explore ideas about materiality and mutability, working particularly with pastry and caramel sculptures.
Nayland Blake- Feeder 2, 1998. House made from slabs of ginger bread, which made reference to the gingerbread house in the fairytale of Hansen and Gretel, and to Uncle Tom's Cabin, both stories that he treasured from his childhood. Visitors to the gallery were overwhelmed by the sensual and oldfactory experience of the work; the were unable to stop themselves from breaking bits off the house and eating them.
Rirkrit Tiravanija -bacon-flavoured cirsps in two suitcases, invited the public to eat the work. Untitled(view) 1993 - ICA London, he cooked and served curry to the crowds who attended, selling vacuum packs for those who wanted to take the artwork home. Untitled (Free) 1995 - He transformed the back room of the gallery into a kitchen with a refrigerator, tables and chairs, electric hot plates, cutlery, cutting boards, woks and teapots. Bags of rice, spices and packets of bouillon cubes were the basic ingredients of a meal that was served to all who came during seven-week exhibition. Uneaten meals, the plates and cutlery remained unwashed and piled up in the gallery, and these deteriorated into a pile of smelly garbage.
Helen Chadwick -Of Mutability & Carcass 1986 ( a phrase from Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene 1590, in which poet writes about how all things are subject to change. Chadwick stated: 'My work is to do with the burden of physicality and sentience, and how desires and pleasures are very fleeting. How all human experience seems to be very frail, like a bubble', recalling the idea of the vanitas. A large glass column, Carcass (visible behind the golden spheres), was filled daily with food waste from her own street in East London. The column sprang a leak, flooding the gallery with foul-smelling fluids.
James Lee Byars - The Rose Table of Perfect 1989. 3,333 fresh and perfect red roses set in a Styrofoam ball. Most of his work was directed at examining the 'Perfect', probably an unattainable state on this earth, and works like this give evidence of this as they decay.
Anya Gallaccio- Red on Green, 2002. She also looked at the spectacle of entropy, and has come to the same point as Byars, but from a different path. She, too uses seductive objects like roses to demonstrate this. In works such as Red on Green, she arranges a large number of brightly coloured flowers in a geometrical formation on a gallery floor, sometimes covering them with a sheet of glass. The flowers progress from florist-fresh to shrivelled stalks, losing their colour and becoming smelly and mouldy, revealing the 'physical transformation of matter from artificial symmetry to artless disorder. Gallaccio has also worked with fruit, sugar and ice.
Damien Hirst- A Thousand Years, 1990.(uses living and death material to make its point about the life cycle; within a divided glass-and-steel vitrine lies a rotting cow's head infested by a colony of maggots, which hatch into bluebottles, only to be immediately electrocuted by the insect-o-cutor that hangs above.) Concerned with the transience of life and the permanence of death. He launched himself into London art scene in 1988 by curating 'Freeze', an exhibition of his own and fellow artist's work.
Wim Delvoye - Cloaca, 2000. He is interested in the scatological nature of man. In 2000, he collaborated with scientists at Antwerp University to construct a machine that he called Cloaca, which replicates the functions of the human digestive system, producing human-like excrement after being fed two cooked meals a day.
Piero Manzoni - precursor to the Arte Povera Movement, took subversive step in 1961 of tinning his own excrement and offering it for sale by the ounce, and works involving ideas about excrement usually pay homage to this.
Two sculptors who deal with the vanitas theme by using the form of the human body are Urs Fischer and Tom Friedman.
Urs Fischer - Untitled 2001- Life size wax candles in the form of unfinished female nudes, which self-destruct during their display as the wax melts and their limbs fall off. He feels that this is the age of a 'meltdown' of information, and his work in a way mirrors this feeling; he has spoken of wanting to make work 'that disappears into its surroundings'. He is also pleased to allow his work to escape from his control and follow its own path.
Tom Friedman - Untitled, 1999 - three-quarter size self -portrait, made entirely from stacked white sugar cubes which crumble slightly during display, causing a white penumbra to from around the figure's feet. The crystalline nature of the sugar is an ironic allusion to the crystalline nature of white marble, the material used by classical sculptors for heroic male nudes.
Xu Bing - Panda Zoo 1998 - he choose male pig, American York, and a female pig, a Chinese Changbai. The animals were breeder stock and, wearing panda masks, they were put in a pen and displayed. Bing intended the work to be a metaphoric manifestation of the differences between East and West, and the ways in which the opposing cultures try to interact.
Yukinori Yanagi - One Dollar, 1999 - consists of a US dollar bull sculpted in coloured sand, held inside clear plastic boxes. When the work goes on show, a colony of live ants is introduced to the boxes and for the duration of the exhibition they tunnel though the sand, gradually destroying the image. The ants' tireless labour undermines the symbol of American might, power and money. When the image has virtually disappeared, Yanagi releases the ants outdoors.
Rivane Neuenschwander - Spell 2001 - She brings to here work a delicate balance between the fragile nature of the material and the geometric, repetitive aesthetic order she imposes on it. This structure helps counterbalance the evanescence of the materials. For a handful of shows, she has spelt out the alphabet, filling the letters in with spices, from acafrao to zatar, and suffusing the gallery with a minglead aroma.
Cai Guo-Qiang - Project to Extend the Great Wall of China by 10,000 Metres, 1993.(western end of the Great Wall in the Gobi desert - smaller charges placed in intervals of 10 meters and larger ones at 1000 meters.) Wariety of works using gunpowder, which was invented in China as a by-product of alchemy. He was attracted to the unpredictable energy of the medium, with its destructive and constructive natures, and probably bad a little knowledge of Takis's work with fireworks when he began his own experiments. He has used gunpowder to make paintings, and also huge outdoors projects.Twenty years before Guo-Qiang , Roman Signer began to work with explosive materials - Water Boots 1986. His favorite materials are water, fire and air, as well as time, and he is a master in working with dynamite. Presentation of an exploding umbrella, which shoots up tho the gallery ceiling and remains there without blowing up the rest of the building.
Giuseppe Gabellone - Untitled 1999- He makes both, minimal structures and earthy, biomorphic sculptures, which he photographs, but after clicking the shutter he usually destroys them. The photograph on the gallery wall records the absence of a presence. Gabellone denies the viewer a direct encounter with the work, offering instead a flat image, which is more often the way in which we experience sculpture. in this time of virtual reality, he asks the gallery viewer to consider which work is more real: the photograph on the non-existent sculpture.
Colour - Surface - Light
COLOUR - SURFACE - LIGHT source: Sculpture Today – Judith Collins
Wolfgang Laib – Pollen from hazelnut tree 1993
-raw pollen as a substance for making sculpture, both as a coloured pigment and as a structural material. He lives near a small village in southern Germany whose inhabitants traditionally spend from February to September every year collecting pollen from blossoms in the surrounding meadows and woods, usually pine, hazelnut and dandelion. Laib finds pollen beautiful, ephemeral and dense. They are extremely vulnerable and fragile, as their title hints. Laib spreads large carpets of pollen on the gallery floor, and these ephemeral rectangles recall American colour-field paintings.
-black and white was considered as not colours by Newton, Goethe proposed that they can – using them as moral comparisons between darkness and light. The social philosopher Rudolf Steiner (1861 – 1925) edited Goethe’s papers and believed that black carbon was the primary matter from which everything else comes, and he backed up this belief by invoking the biblical statement about God creating the world by separating light from darkness, which implies that darkness precedes light.
David Nash, who works with wood, is an admirer of the work of Steiner, and he began in 1975 to char the surface of some of his pieces, either by placing them in a fire or stove, or using a blowtorch, changing the surface layer of the wood from a vegetable material into a mineral – carbon.
Work: Vessel and Volume 1988 – is a charred sculpture comprising two parts, the smaller of which has been cut out of the larger. Nash has discovered that the black surface distances the viewer so that they experience the shape of the sculpture before they acknowledge that it is made of wood. The smell of the charring lingers, and provides the viewer with another sensory experience.
In complete contrast to this chromatic display are works using glass and mirrors, transparent and translucent panels and polished surfaces, which reflect, diffuse and transmit light. Many artists who work in this way are based on the west coast of America, centred around Los Angeles. The California Light and Space group of artist emerged in the 1960s, and included Larry Bell, Robert Irwin, James Turrell and Bruce Nauman. Bell began to use refractive and reflective materials such as mirrors and tinted glass, and in doing so introduced a new ingredient into his sculpture: the viewer, whose image was combined or superimposed on that of other viewers and reflections of the surrounding environment. Viewers thus became aware that they were the primary objects of perception, and could see themselves caught in the act of looking at a work of art. This slightly unnerving condition altered their experience of the work of art and drew them unwittingly into a web of phenomenological ideas. The popular reading among the California Light and Space group was Phenomenology of Perception 1962 by Maurice Merleau-Ponty.
Larry Bell 6x6x4 AB 1995/ Made for Arolsen 1992
Bell started as a painter, but since 1962 has made glass and mirrored sculptures of refined simplicity. He began with boxes and cubes and than moved on to making works of an environmental nature.
Robert Irwin – began to use new materials in order to work with light and space. He, like Bell, was interested in materials that possessed the capacity to dissolve form and eliminate the object. He too began as an Abstract Expressionist painter, but gave it up in 1970 in favour of environmental works that manipulate and augment the viewer’s apprehension of the space in which he stands.
Work: 1234, 1992
Irwin works with ephemeral and transparent materials, such as nylon scrim, nylon organza, tape and string, creating veils and wall divisions that alter the viewer’s experience of light and space. Existing windows, doors and lights offer a soft, diffused light onto the space, so that this atmospheric work appears as though seen through a gentle fog.
James Turrell is fascinated by the effect of light on space and how this affects the viewer’s perception. He studied perceptual psychology and mathematics at college, and became interested in Merleau-Ponty’s exploration of the relationship between perception and illusion. His career began with gallery installations in which light was perceived as a physical, almost tactile presence (work: Catso, Red 1967), but, following his skyspaces, he moved on to working with natural light, out of doors.
Dan Graham – Two Different Anamorphic Surfaces 2000
Robert Morris – made regular geometrical forms such as cubes, using glass and mirrors
Katy Schimert – The Sun 1998 (uses colour glass – mythological themes including real and imaginary characters from the mast and the present)
Roni Horn - (uses glass – water themes)
Shirazeh Houshiary – Isthmus 1992
Alison Wilding – Assembly 1991 – Wilding uses copper, brass, galvanized and leaded steel, along with wood, usually oak, rubber sheeting and stone. Her titles reference water, fluidity and light and her materials contrast transparency and opacity, light and shadow, weight and immateriality.
Rachel Whiteread –Water Tower 1998
Another band of artists who use light in formal, literal and phenomenal ways. 1960s – Chryssa, Dan Flavin, Keith Sonnier, Bruce Nauman, Joseph Kosuth and Bridgitte Kowanz – all experimented with neon and fluorescent tubes, introducing a radical new material into sculpture.
David Batchelor – The Spectrum of Brick Lane, 2003.
Erwin Redl – Matrix II, 2000-3 his work is concerned with ‘how abstraction becomes a physical sensation’. He works with lines and grids and recently has been exploring LEDs as a sculptural medium. These tiny, bright lights are commonly used in digitally programmed arrays to create simple repeating texts, usually of welcome or warning. Redl liberates the electronic components from their communicative function to create large scale architectural installations. Stringing together thousands of LEDs, he creates walls of light transforming a medium best known for conveying ephemeral, digitized information into powerful visual interventions.
Ann Veronica Janssens – 16 views of Blue, Red and Yellow, 2001.
Formless dematerialized works made from coloured fog. She has written of her work as ‘places for the capture light’, and states that she wants to push back the limits of perception. When viewers enter one of her coloured fog installations, which take place both indoors and outdoors, they are immediately aware of the precarious position of other viewers. Her Blue, Red and Yellow is a cuboid with translucent walls covered in transparent films of colour. The cube was filled with dense mist, which altered as the viewer moved through it ‘in a dematerialized coloured abstraction’.
Olafur Eliasson – The Weather Project, 2003. (Tate modern – turbine hall – hundred of mono frequency lamps, the kind used in street lighting, and he clothed the ceiling with mirrors. A fine mist hung in the air, which added to the intensity of the experience, lifting the spirits of Tate’s winter visitors.)
Similar aesthetic outlook to Janssens, and uses light, heat, wind, fire, steam and ice – basically natural phenomena – in urban settings. His ongoing preoccupation is the study of ways in which humans perceive natural phenomena, and his intriguing large-scale works allow the viewer to examine what they are experiencing: ‘The benefit in disclosing the means with which I am working is that it enables the viewer to understand the experience itself as a construction and so, to a higher extent, allow them to question and evaluate the impact this experience has on them.’
Tuesday 27 December 2011
Dyngby House
It's by a Danish Summer house by Claus Hermansen Architects, Dyngby, Denmark | 2003
An oxidized steel mesh is hung off the wood stud structure of the house. The mesh allows the seasons to determine the density and coloration of the leafy envelope.
Part of the mesh enclosure surrounding the windows and sliding glass doors are made into hinged opening, which can be unshuttered to allow direct light inside. When not in use, the house closes up, leaving only a verdant apparition that fades into the surrounding landscape.
An oxidized steel mesh is hung off the wood stud structure of the house. The mesh allows the seasons to determine the density and coloration of the leafy envelope.
The Figure
THE FIGURE - source: Sculpture Today – Judith Collins
For most of its long history, sculptures primary concern has been realistic representation of the human body, both naked of clothed.
Over centuries - human body have been used to express abstract concepts as well as particular narratives, emotions, aspirations which have been pressed into the service of religion, mythology, ideologies, politics and national identity.
In 1960's the body lost its prominence as the prime subject for sculpture. This was the decade when simplified geometrical sculptures began to appear in America and Britain, heralding the beginning of a new sculptural movement = decade of nuclear missiles developed by the two superpowers Russia and America caused widespread mood anxiety.
Artists began using their own bodies in performances and happenings, physically acting our issues involving the implications of nuclear war and global domination, sexuality, desire, identity, illness, gender inequality and homophobia, without feeling the need to make three dimensional objects that would depict and concertize these concerns.
At the end of 1970's and beginning 1980's there was a return to figurative art, both painted and sculpted. Return led by Italian and German painters, who paved the way for sculptors. German painters as:
They started to work in neo-expressionist manner, suggesting some kind of allegiance to their artistic forebears.
Figurative art - derived from real object sources, and therefore by definition representational
Italian painters:
Francesco Clemente - Name
Mimmo Paladino
A significant publication appeared in 1982 titled POWERS OF HORROR: AN ESSAY ON ABJECTION by the(Bulgarian-French) philosopher Julia Kristeva
This examined the concept of the abject, building on earlier ideas of the surrealist writer Geroges Bataille, and it caused 'ABJECTION' to become buzz word in art articles from early 1980's until the mid 1990's. Kristeva described the abject as the private and intimate aspects of the body, such as bodily functions and fluids, which are deemed inappropriate for public display. Kristeva addresses a condition of loss of faith in unified rational or religios systems, though unlike them she sees the individual subject's sense of abjection as the basic condition which these systems serve to mask.
This book was widely read in art circles in the 1980's and in 1993 the Whitney museum of Amercian Art, New York, organized and exhibition called 'Abject Art': Repulsion and Desire in American Art, which included, amongst others, the American sculptors: Louise Bourgeois, Kiki Smith and Robert Gober.
The body was presented as damaged, wounded, suffering, disordered, and conveying political aspects arrached to its sexuality, gender, and ethic identity, often accompanied by representation of body fluids, such as blood, semen, excrement and vomit. The suffering, semi-naked Christ, with his blood, sweat and tears, became a significant icon at this time, and many figural sculptures adopted a pose similar to that of the crucifixion.
Mark Wallinger looks at the 'politics of representation'. Invited to make an outdoor sculpture for a large plinth of Trafalgar Square. White marbleized resin, with a real barbed-wire crown coated in gold leaf. The figures eyes are closed, his hands tied behind his back, and he is naked except for a loincloth. The Latin title 'Behold the Man' comes from the Bible and reveals the figure to be a representation of Christ, depicted at the moment when Pontius Pilate asked the crowd whether He should undergo crucifixion. He commented: 'I think it was important that the figure was life-size, that it operated as a kind of inversion of all the other statues in the square. The latter are like trophies and triumphant scenes of empire, and they are huge and black and oversized.'
Marc Wallinger - Ecce Homo 1999
Georg Baselitz - Model for a Sculpture 1979/80
Figure held between falling and rising, in uncomfortable pose. The raised arm is the most positive aspect of this awkward and constrained form, which has not fully emerged from the block of wood. Not many poses that a figural sculpture can adopt, beyond standing, sitting, reclining and lying, and Baselitz has chosen one that is unresolved, rather like the title of his work.
Stephan Balkehol - Man with White Vest - 1995 - The pose of the figure is relaxed and unheroic, with one hand stuffed in his pocket and the mood reinforced by his undress. Balkehol chooses soft woods, such as poplar or African wawa, as here, and uses a power saw followed by a chisel. The chisel marks are still visible through the painted surface, rendering the work's status as a sculpture undeniable.
Henk Visch - Untitled 1981- Carved wood and scraps of paper attached. It's gesture is enigmatic, with the figure kneeling and appearing to throw two paper sheets upwards. The figures's face looks heavenward and seems to be smiling, as though it is capable of defying gravity. It was executed in the same year as another carved wood figure called Angel, and both sculptures seem to express a desire to fly.
Martin Disler - O.T. 1991 - His sculptures usually in bronze, shared stylistic characteristics with the wild, gesturing bodies found in German paintings. His androgynous creatures have large heads on top of etiolated bodies and limbs, some of which are missing. They dance melancholically to their own music.
Mimmo Paladino - Cadute a Ragione 1995 - Part of painters group (Chia, Cucchi, Clemente) in Italy who began to make figurative sculptures in the early 80's. They mostly used stone and bronze, making silent, hermetic figures who gesture in the execution of obscure rituals. There is a suggestion of the classical antique style in their work, a cultural heritage with which Italian artists have to deal, as well as a hint of the smoothed-down, mysterious figures found in Italian Metaphysical paintings of the 1920s by Giorgio de Chirico and Carlo Carra.
John Davies - Two Figures (pick-a-back) 1977-80. The group sculptures frequently depict situations of dominance and subservience, although Davies sees such actions as ordinary, everyday gestures. He models the bodies in clay, but casts heads and arms from life. The disparate parts are made of fibreglass, assembled and coated with a thick, dull, grey paint, which gives them the pallor of corpses. a quality competed by their expressionless glass eyes. The figures usually wear throusers and shoes, but are naked from the waist up and often seem vulnerable.
Juan Munoz - London Conversation Piece II - 1993. He began his career as a writer and curator. He made cast-resin figures, which he set in elaborate ensembles and installations, that exude a sense of melancholy and alienation. His figures are usually under life-size, and they are often set at a distance from the viewer, which increases their diminution. In the early 1990s, he made hundreds of grey, fibreglass figures of men in suits who chat, laugh and interact with each other. Munoz also made a series of strange, child like figures, some of which were called Dancers, but whose bodies end in lumpy hemispheres instead of legs.
Evan Penny - Jim 1985. Taught academic figure-modeling at the art school in Calgary, Canada. Making figure in the mid 1970s was not the way in which to forge artistic career, Penny started to make welded steel abstract shapes, but this did not satisfy his desire to work with scale, material, colour, and above all a surface filled with detail. He returned to figure modeling in clay and chose people he knew as subjects, allowing them to find their position and gesture so that all aesthetic decisions were avoided, and he was left to record his neutral version of everyman in the most lifelike manner possible. In order to avoid being accused of casting the figure from life, he works at four-fifths life-size, which puts the work at a slight remove from the viewer. Penny's sculptures cause a shudder of unease, and have been described as 'uncanny'.(Term derived from Sigmund Freud's essay 'The Uncanny' in 1919).
James Croak - Dirt Baby 2003. He began as an abstract artist working with metal, but when he moved to Los Angeles 1976, he started to make figures, both human and animal. He describe himself as 'a surrealist sculptor using conceptual figuration as his technique'. Later he discovered his trademark material, cast dirt. He was looking for a neutral and cheap material, and dirt was readily available in the streets and gutters of Brooklyn. He models his figures in clay, using a life model as well as reference photographs. He mixes his dirt with a resin binder, which is poured into the cast. He is an admirer of the sculpture of Lopez-Garcia.
Since there is a strong emphasis in contemporary art on the idiosyncratic subjectivity of the artist, it follows that the gender of the artist will play a part in the formation of their style and content, particularly when dealing with the human figure. Do women sculptors work to a different agenda from those of their male counterparts? If anything, they could be said to veer a little more towards autobiographical introspection.
Kiki Smith - Pee Body, 1992. Human body, usually female, as a battered subject, concentrating on its fragility and vulnerability, but also imbuing it with a sense of endurance. She states that her strong Catholic roots have affected her subject matter, and the pained endurance of some of her female figures have their counterparts in the suffering female saints and Christ figures of earlier religious art. Her training as an emergency medical technician gave her first-hand knowledge of damage to the body. Wide range of materials - glass, plaster, ceramic, wax, bronze, fabrics, embroidery, clay and paper. She started with internal fragments of the human body.
Berlinde de Bruyckere - Hanne 2003. Making works with thick woolen blankets symbolizing warmth and protection, but also vulnerability and fear. The blankets then began to cover shapes such as cages, and progressed by the mid-1990s to her 'Blanket Women', female figures, usually made of plaster covered with a layer of wax, whose naked arms and legs are glimpsed under piles of woolen blankets, eluding the gaze of the viewer. She started to cover the bodies and faces with long horsehair, which acts as protective veil.
Mathilde ter Heijne - Humans Sacrifice 2000. Makes self-portraits(body casts), which she uses in installations and videos. In the installations, the figures are usually accompanied by sound systems, such as CD players and radios, and appear lost in their own world. In the videos, the mood is one of violence and unrest.
Miroslaw Balka - The Salt Seller 1988-9 - depict a naked male figure in a crouching position, with his wrists pressed against his forehead in what looks like a gesture of exhaustion or despair. Beside the figure is a cone of salt, a material produced by both human tears and sweat, with which this figure appears to be all too familiar. But salt is also necessary for life: without it we die. His work is always autobiographical, centering on the human figure and using humble materials to make powerful statements about human experience.In 1990, the human figure disappeared from Balka's work, and he began instead to make room-sized installations and objects - like a bed or a coffin, based on the measurements of his own body - and to work with material such as soap, pine needles and ash. These works suggest a sense of corporeality felt through its absence.
Pawel Althamer - Self -Portrait 1993- figure from bundles of hemp fibers and coated with a wax skin, onto which real hair was applied. Althamer wanted every detail to be as lifelike as possible - eyelashes, genitals, veins and fingernails. Polish artist, began his career staging performance events that subjected his body to various ordeals, such submerging himself in water for three hours. When this phase ended, he started to make life-size, nude, standing figures from humble materials - sewn and bound bundles of grass, which echoed the bundles of muscles. He also covered a nude male figure with pieces of animal skin sewn together, which gave it the look of a relic from prehistory.
Katsura Funakoshi - With no Horns, Herbivorous, 2004. He has been carving serene figures from camphor wood, a traditional material that appeals to him because of its distinctive smell and the resemblance of the colour of the wood to human skin. The surfaces of his figres are varied, sometimes smooth and polished, sometimes with the small chisel marks showing. They are usually painted in subtle hues to enhance the connection between wood and flesh, and the eyes are marble. The figures are not portraits, but they have a tender yet assertive presence. Some of them have strange attachments, such as wings, parts of animals, or isolated body parts.
Sunday Jack Akpan - Chief of Police (3 stripes) 1989. Nigerian sculptor gave up his career in bricklaying to pursue a vocation making life-size funerary figures in cement. His business card reads: 'Natural Authentic Sculptor', and his works are life size and painted to look as lifelike as possible.
Ousmane Sow- Dancer with Short Hair (Nouba) 1985
Wim Delvoye - Compass Rose of Wind 1993 - Figures stop their ears with their thumbs and close their eyes with their fingers, so that they cannot see or hear. A large tube extends from their mouths and this is connected through their bodies to a smaller tube, which projects from their anuses. If one looks through the tube, one can see all the way through the body.
Jan van Oost - Black Figure in Corner 1993 - He said that he wants to work with the dark side of life, where death is ever present, and his swaddled figures appear to cower in fear or despair.
Steven Gontarski - Prophet 2001 - He made fiberglass figures with a high gloss sheen, and sometimes a bright colour, and he leaves some figures with parts of their anatomies missing.Calling a group of them 'Prophets' he suggests an inner content.
George Segal -Woman in a White Wicker Rocker 1984-9 - human casts - firstly he casted his figures from plaster and later in bronze painted in white.
Duane Hanson -Old Man Dozing- hyperrealist figures as real as possible in fiberglass and polyester resin. Pioneer to employ this medium for figurative sculpture. His first life casts in 1967 depicted figures that had undergone violence or suffering, such as rape, and Hanson doctored the casts to achieve these dramatic tableaux. 1970 he found his theme: the typical American involved in ordinary tasks, the same theme that had been adopted by Segal. Hanson chose his models with care, and he looked for people, like this man, who were a bit careworn and tired. He would have asked the man to adopt a pose that was natural fro him and that was easy to maintain while the moulds were made of his body. The Hanson took the same care with the clothing such as the old, polished shoes and the watch and wedding ring. Hanson's figures look so realistic in gallery environments that tehy constantly fool the viewer with their trompe l'oeil effects.
John DeAndrea - Allegory: After Courbet-1988. Share with Hanson the desire to deceive the viewer into believing that his figures are real. Although there are similarities in the means and materials by which these two artists arrive at their counterfeit representations of the body -- employing, polyester, polyvinyl, fibreglass, oil paint, real hair, and glass eyes -- they differ markedly in their aims and intentions. From the start of his career in 1970 until the present day, DeAndrea has concentrated almost exclusively on nude female models such as Diane. He presents his naked woman singly or in pairs, in twisted poses in which their limbs fold in on each other, emphasizing their introspective mood; their somewhat victim-like status keeps them in a 1970s time warp. His most significant statement is his tableaux Allegory: After Courbet, which depicts a self portrait cast accompanied by a draped , nude female model. Title refers to a huge controversial painting Gustave Courbet: Interior of my studio, a real allegory summing up seven years of my life as an artist, which showed Courbet painting, among a company of clothed men, attended by a draped, nude female model who appears as his muse. DeAndrea looks into a negative plaster mould of the model's face and muses on his own muse.
John Ahearn - Maria and her Mother, 1987. Began life-cast portraits of his friends 1979 Manhattan. His aim was to produce art that was popular and accessible. Later life-cast of people Latino-American population of his neighborhood; he creates two casts of each person, one of which is for sale and one for the sitter. His life-casting takes place outside, usually on the pavement, so that it becomes part of the fabric daily life. He uses bright colour paints for figures clothes and paints their eyes open to make his figures more animated.
Charles Ray - Male Mannequin, 1990 -shop window mannequin with artists face and genitals, surrounded by a halo of pubic hair. Male mannequins do not come equipped with realistic genitals, and Ray has transformed the bland ideal into the real with unsettling results. He adopts a variety of styles, materials and processes, and one of these involves life-casting. All of his activities examine what is real, what is literal. and he often uses the human figure to make the commonplace strange.
Olaf Nicolai - Self-Portrait as a Weeping Narcissus, 2000 - an odd sculptural tableaux that is both formally striking and conceptually rich. Nicolai has chosen to create an amalgam of the everyday and the mythical. The artist, dressed in casual clothes, kneels on a grassy bank and gazes, enrapt, into a small pool. Every few seconds a concealed electric pump causes tears to fall from his eyes into the pool. This refers to the classical myth of Narcissus, a beautiful youth who falls in love with his mirror image reflected in water. This work is in keeping with a recent trend towards self-representation in painting, photography and sculpture, in which the protagonists role-play, presenting themselves in a range of bizarre situations and guises.
For most of its long history, sculptures primary concern has been realistic representation of the human body, both naked of clothed.
Over centuries - human body have been used to express abstract concepts as well as particular narratives, emotions, aspirations which have been pressed into the service of religion, mythology, ideologies, politics and national identity.
In 1960's the body lost its prominence as the prime subject for sculpture. This was the decade when simplified geometrical sculptures began to appear in America and Britain, heralding the beginning of a new sculptural movement = decade of nuclear missiles developed by the two superpowers Russia and America caused widespread mood anxiety.
Artists began using their own bodies in performances and happenings, physically acting our issues involving the implications of nuclear war and global domination, sexuality, desire, identity, illness, gender inequality and homophobia, without feeling the need to make three dimensional objects that would depict and concertize these concerns.
At the end of 1970's and beginning 1980's there was a return to figurative art, both painted and sculpted. Return led by Italian and German painters, who paved the way for sculptors. German painters as:
George Baselitz
Marcus Lupertz
Anselm Kiefer |
| George Baselitz - Piet in kurzer Hose (Remix), 2008 |
 |
| Marcus Lupertz |
 |
| Anselm Kiefer - Seraphim |
They started to work in neo-expressionist manner, suggesting some kind of allegiance to their artistic forebears.
Figurative art - derived from real object sources, and therefore by definition representational
Italian painters:
Sandro Chia
Enzo Cucchi
Francesco Clemente
Mimmo Paladino |
| Sandro Chia - Left Side |
 |
| Sandro Cucchi -Sotto Lingua |
In early 1980's a romantic mysterious or expressionist style emerged for a short period inspired by the art and artefacts of a diverse range of cultures, mostly non Europian.
However, the aids epidemic, which surfaced at this time, had a powerful effect, causing the human body to be seen less as a conquering hero or embodiment of symbolic virtue, and more as a victim of global diseases and threats.
A significant publication appeared in 1982 titled POWERS OF HORROR: AN ESSAY ON ABJECTION by the(Bulgarian-French) philosopher Julia Kristeva
This examined the concept of the abject, building on earlier ideas of the surrealist writer Geroges Bataille, and it caused 'ABJECTION' to become buzz word in art articles from early 1980's until the mid 1990's. Kristeva described the abject as the private and intimate aspects of the body, such as bodily functions and fluids, which are deemed inappropriate for public display. Kristeva addresses a condition of loss of faith in unified rational or religios systems, though unlike them she sees the individual subject's sense of abjection as the basic condition which these systems serve to mask.
This book was widely read in art circles in the 1980's and in 1993 the Whitney museum of Amercian Art, New York, organized and exhibition called 'Abject Art': Repulsion and Desire in American Art, which included, amongst others, the American sculptors: Louise Bourgeois, Kiki Smith and Robert Gober.
The body was presented as damaged, wounded, suffering, disordered, and conveying political aspects arrached to its sexuality, gender, and ethic identity, often accompanied by representation of body fluids, such as blood, semen, excrement and vomit. The suffering, semi-naked Christ, with his blood, sweat and tears, became a significant icon at this time, and many figural sculptures adopted a pose similar to that of the crucifixion.
Mark Wallinger looks at the 'politics of representation'. Invited to make an outdoor sculpture for a large plinth of Trafalgar Square. White marbleized resin, with a real barbed-wire crown coated in gold leaf. The figures eyes are closed, his hands tied behind his back, and he is naked except for a loincloth. The Latin title 'Behold the Man' comes from the Bible and reveals the figure to be a representation of Christ, depicted at the moment when Pontius Pilate asked the crowd whether He should undergo crucifixion. He commented: 'I think it was important that the figure was life-size, that it operated as a kind of inversion of all the other statues in the square. The latter are like trophies and triumphant scenes of empire, and they are huge and black and oversized.'
Georg Baselitz - Model for a Sculpture 1979/80
Figure held between falling and rising, in uncomfortable pose. The raised arm is the most positive aspect of this awkward and constrained form, which has not fully emerged from the block of wood. Not many poses that a figural sculpture can adopt, beyond standing, sitting, reclining and lying, and Baselitz has chosen one that is unresolved, rather like the title of his work.
Stephan Balkehol - Man with White Vest - 1995 - The pose of the figure is relaxed and unheroic, with one hand stuffed in his pocket and the mood reinforced by his undress. Balkehol chooses soft woods, such as poplar or African wawa, as here, and uses a power saw followed by a chisel. The chisel marks are still visible through the painted surface, rendering the work's status as a sculpture undeniable.
Henk Visch - Untitled 1981- Carved wood and scraps of paper attached. It's gesture is enigmatic, with the figure kneeling and appearing to throw two paper sheets upwards. The figures's face looks heavenward and seems to be smiling, as though it is capable of defying gravity. It was executed in the same year as another carved wood figure called Angel, and both sculptures seem to express a desire to fly.
Martin Disler - O.T. 1991 - His sculptures usually in bronze, shared stylistic characteristics with the wild, gesturing bodies found in German paintings. His androgynous creatures have large heads on top of etiolated bodies and limbs, some of which are missing. They dance melancholically to their own music.
Mimmo Paladino - Cadute a Ragione 1995 - Part of painters group (Chia, Cucchi, Clemente) in Italy who began to make figurative sculptures in the early 80's. They mostly used stone and bronze, making silent, hermetic figures who gesture in the execution of obscure rituals. There is a suggestion of the classical antique style in their work, a cultural heritage with which Italian artists have to deal, as well as a hint of the smoothed-down, mysterious figures found in Italian Metaphysical paintings of the 1920s by Giorgio de Chirico and Carlo Carra.
John Davies - Two Figures (pick-a-back) 1977-80. The group sculptures frequently depict situations of dominance and subservience, although Davies sees such actions as ordinary, everyday gestures. He models the bodies in clay, but casts heads and arms from life. The disparate parts are made of fibreglass, assembled and coated with a thick, dull, grey paint, which gives them the pallor of corpses. a quality competed by their expressionless glass eyes. The figures usually wear throusers and shoes, but are naked from the waist up and often seem vulnerable.
Juan Munoz - London Conversation Piece II - 1993. He began his career as a writer and curator. He made cast-resin figures, which he set in elaborate ensembles and installations, that exude a sense of melancholy and alienation. His figures are usually under life-size, and they are often set at a distance from the viewer, which increases their diminution. In the early 1990s, he made hundreds of grey, fibreglass figures of men in suits who chat, laugh and interact with each other. Munoz also made a series of strange, child like figures, some of which were called Dancers, but whose bodies end in lumpy hemispheres instead of legs.
Evan Penny - Jim 1985. Taught academic figure-modeling at the art school in Calgary, Canada. Making figure in the mid 1970s was not the way in which to forge artistic career, Penny started to make welded steel abstract shapes, but this did not satisfy his desire to work with scale, material, colour, and above all a surface filled with detail. He returned to figure modeling in clay and chose people he knew as subjects, allowing them to find their position and gesture so that all aesthetic decisions were avoided, and he was left to record his neutral version of everyman in the most lifelike manner possible. In order to avoid being accused of casting the figure from life, he works at four-fifths life-size, which puts the work at a slight remove from the viewer. Penny's sculptures cause a shudder of unease, and have been described as 'uncanny'.(Term derived from Sigmund Freud's essay 'The Uncanny' in 1919).
James Croak - Dirt Baby 2003. He began as an abstract artist working with metal, but when he moved to Los Angeles 1976, he started to make figures, both human and animal. He describe himself as 'a surrealist sculptor using conceptual figuration as his technique'. Later he discovered his trademark material, cast dirt. He was looking for a neutral and cheap material, and dirt was readily available in the streets and gutters of Brooklyn. He models his figures in clay, using a life model as well as reference photographs. He mixes his dirt with a resin binder, which is poured into the cast. He is an admirer of the sculpture of Lopez-Garcia.
Since there is a strong emphasis in contemporary art on the idiosyncratic subjectivity of the artist, it follows that the gender of the artist will play a part in the formation of their style and content, particularly when dealing with the human figure. Do women sculptors work to a different agenda from those of their male counterparts? If anything, they could be said to veer a little more towards autobiographical introspection.
Kiki Smith - Pee Body, 1992. Human body, usually female, as a battered subject, concentrating on its fragility and vulnerability, but also imbuing it with a sense of endurance. She states that her strong Catholic roots have affected her subject matter, and the pained endurance of some of her female figures have their counterparts in the suffering female saints and Christ figures of earlier religious art. Her training as an emergency medical technician gave her first-hand knowledge of damage to the body. Wide range of materials - glass, plaster, ceramic, wax, bronze, fabrics, embroidery, clay and paper. She started with internal fragments of the human body.
Berlinde de Bruyckere - Hanne 2003. Making works with thick woolen blankets symbolizing warmth and protection, but also vulnerability and fear. The blankets then began to cover shapes such as cages, and progressed by the mid-1990s to her 'Blanket Women', female figures, usually made of plaster covered with a layer of wax, whose naked arms and legs are glimpsed under piles of woolen blankets, eluding the gaze of the viewer. She started to cover the bodies and faces with long horsehair, which acts as protective veil.
Mathilde ter Heijne - Humans Sacrifice 2000. Makes self-portraits(body casts), which she uses in installations and videos. In the installations, the figures are usually accompanied by sound systems, such as CD players and radios, and appear lost in their own world. In the videos, the mood is one of violence and unrest.
Miroslaw Balka - The Salt Seller 1988-9 - depict a naked male figure in a crouching position, with his wrists pressed against his forehead in what looks like a gesture of exhaustion or despair. Beside the figure is a cone of salt, a material produced by both human tears and sweat, with which this figure appears to be all too familiar. But salt is also necessary for life: without it we die. His work is always autobiographical, centering on the human figure and using humble materials to make powerful statements about human experience.In 1990, the human figure disappeared from Balka's work, and he began instead to make room-sized installations and objects - like a bed or a coffin, based on the measurements of his own body - and to work with material such as soap, pine needles and ash. These works suggest a sense of corporeality felt through its absence.
Pawel Althamer - Self -Portrait 1993- figure from bundles of hemp fibers and coated with a wax skin, onto which real hair was applied. Althamer wanted every detail to be as lifelike as possible - eyelashes, genitals, veins and fingernails. Polish artist, began his career staging performance events that subjected his body to various ordeals, such submerging himself in water for three hours. When this phase ended, he started to make life-size, nude, standing figures from humble materials - sewn and bound bundles of grass, which echoed the bundles of muscles. He also covered a nude male figure with pieces of animal skin sewn together, which gave it the look of a relic from prehistory.
Katsura Funakoshi - With no Horns, Herbivorous, 2004. He has been carving serene figures from camphor wood, a traditional material that appeals to him because of its distinctive smell and the resemblance of the colour of the wood to human skin. The surfaces of his figres are varied, sometimes smooth and polished, sometimes with the small chisel marks showing. They are usually painted in subtle hues to enhance the connection between wood and flesh, and the eyes are marble. The figures are not portraits, but they have a tender yet assertive presence. Some of them have strange attachments, such as wings, parts of animals, or isolated body parts.
Sunday Jack Akpan - Chief of Police (3 stripes) 1989. Nigerian sculptor gave up his career in bricklaying to pursue a vocation making life-size funerary figures in cement. His business card reads: 'Natural Authentic Sculptor', and his works are life size and painted to look as lifelike as possible.
Ousmane Sow- Dancer with Short Hair (Nouba) 1985
Wim Delvoye - Compass Rose of Wind 1993 - Figures stop their ears with their thumbs and close their eyes with their fingers, so that they cannot see or hear. A large tube extends from their mouths and this is connected through their bodies to a smaller tube, which projects from their anuses. If one looks through the tube, one can see all the way through the body.
Jan van Oost - Black Figure in Corner 1993 - He said that he wants to work with the dark side of life, where death is ever present, and his swaddled figures appear to cower in fear or despair.
Steven Gontarski - Prophet 2001 - He made fiberglass figures with a high gloss sheen, and sometimes a bright colour, and he leaves some figures with parts of their anatomies missing.Calling a group of them 'Prophets' he suggests an inner content.
George Segal -Woman in a White Wicker Rocker 1984-9 - human casts - firstly he casted his figures from plaster and later in bronze painted in white.
Duane Hanson -Old Man Dozing- hyperrealist figures as real as possible in fiberglass and polyester resin. Pioneer to employ this medium for figurative sculpture. His first life casts in 1967 depicted figures that had undergone violence or suffering, such as rape, and Hanson doctored the casts to achieve these dramatic tableaux. 1970 he found his theme: the typical American involved in ordinary tasks, the same theme that had been adopted by Segal. Hanson chose his models with care, and he looked for people, like this man, who were a bit careworn and tired. He would have asked the man to adopt a pose that was natural fro him and that was easy to maintain while the moulds were made of his body. The Hanson took the same care with the clothing such as the old, polished shoes and the watch and wedding ring. Hanson's figures look so realistic in gallery environments that tehy constantly fool the viewer with their trompe l'oeil effects.
John DeAndrea - Allegory: After Courbet-1988. Share with Hanson the desire to deceive the viewer into believing that his figures are real. Although there are similarities in the means and materials by which these two artists arrive at their counterfeit representations of the body -- employing, polyester, polyvinyl, fibreglass, oil paint, real hair, and glass eyes -- they differ markedly in their aims and intentions. From the start of his career in 1970 until the present day, DeAndrea has concentrated almost exclusively on nude female models such as Diane. He presents his naked woman singly or in pairs, in twisted poses in which their limbs fold in on each other, emphasizing their introspective mood; their somewhat victim-like status keeps them in a 1970s time warp. His most significant statement is his tableaux Allegory: After Courbet, which depicts a self portrait cast accompanied by a draped , nude female model. Title refers to a huge controversial painting Gustave Courbet: Interior of my studio, a real allegory summing up seven years of my life as an artist, which showed Courbet painting, among a company of clothed men, attended by a draped, nude female model who appears as his muse. DeAndrea looks into a negative plaster mould of the model's face and muses on his own muse.
John Ahearn - Maria and her Mother, 1987. Began life-cast portraits of his friends 1979 Manhattan. His aim was to produce art that was popular and accessible. Later life-cast of people Latino-American population of his neighborhood; he creates two casts of each person, one of which is for sale and one for the sitter. His life-casting takes place outside, usually on the pavement, so that it becomes part of the fabric daily life. He uses bright colour paints for figures clothes and paints their eyes open to make his figures more animated.
Charles Ray - Male Mannequin, 1990 -shop window mannequin with artists face and genitals, surrounded by a halo of pubic hair. Male mannequins do not come equipped with realistic genitals, and Ray has transformed the bland ideal into the real with unsettling results. He adopts a variety of styles, materials and processes, and one of these involves life-casting. All of his activities examine what is real, what is literal. and he often uses the human figure to make the commonplace strange.
Olaf Nicolai - Self-Portrait as a Weeping Narcissus, 2000 - an odd sculptural tableaux that is both formally striking and conceptually rich. Nicolai has chosen to create an amalgam of the everyday and the mythical. The artist, dressed in casual clothes, kneels on a grassy bank and gazes, enrapt, into a small pool. Every few seconds a concealed electric pump causes tears to fall from his eyes into the pool. This refers to the classical myth of Narcissus, a beautiful youth who falls in love with his mirror image reflected in water. This work is in keeping with a recent trend towards self-representation in painting, photography and sculpture, in which the protagonists role-play, presenting themselves in a range of bizarre situations and guises.
Gilles Barbier – Trans-Schizophrenic Anatomy, 1999 – Wax cast of his bald head, sectioned and labelled with slang words for body parts jumbled up with corporate names. Barbier is parodying the death masks that were taken in the nineteenth century, from criminals and geniuses alike, for the study of phrenology, a branch of science that connected the shape of the skull and the parts of the brain to physical an mental faculties.These phrenological heads were inscribed with the names of the different brain parts. Since 1994 has embarked on a series of wax life-cast self-portraits in which he presents himself as both male and female, and, in one work of two figures, My Conscience 1996, as an angel in a long blond wig and an orange devil with a large erection. He describes his reason for turning to life-cast self-portraiture: 'I was totally lost, without any ideas, so I began looking for a type of work that was like a game--something stupid or ridiculous. Copying in art is something stupid--there is no invention, no genius, no pretension.' Apart from the angel figure in the wig, all other self-portraits are bald.
Ugo Rondinone - Bonjour Tristesse,1997 .Concepts of masquerade and disguise can be found in his sculptures. Series of cast figures of plump clowns, he sources his models via advertising, asking for large, middle-aged men, whom he casts and reproduces in Styrofoam. He then paints and clothes the casts. In his installations he places one of more of these figures as if sleeping on the floor or slumped against the walls of the gallery, seeming quite content in their repose. On occasions, he has also presented himself as a clown, and as a straightforward self-portrait, leaning against a gallery wall. The condition of sleep that seems to overwhelm most of Rondinone's life-cast figures alludes to the fact that the eyes have to be closed when a cast is made.
Keith Edmier - Beverly Edmier 1967, 1988 - life cast depicting his mother Beverly at the age of twenty-two in 1967, nine months pregnant with the artist himself as a foetus in her womb, making this one of the most unusual self-portraits in art. She lifts her blouse and gazes down at the child in her womb, and the pose carries allusions to that of the religious sculptural groups of the Virgin Mary and the Pieta -- motherhood and mortality, birth and death.
Anthony Gromley - Untitled (for Francis) - stands in the pose of St Francis of Assisi in Giovanni Bellini's painting St Francis in the Wilderness(c.1480), receiving the stigmata, or wounds, from the crucified Christ, and Gormley's cast has matching holes at these particular points. His work is based on casts taken from his own body. Even though each sculpture is self portrait, his casting process, which smoothes out all extraneous details, turns his figure into a universal everyman. Fiberglass figure is cast from the mould and this is then covered in sheets of lead, which are beaten into shape and welded, leaving the seams visible. Gormley thinks of this process as going to 'a place of darkness and of voluntary immobility. It's death in a way.' His life casts differ in intetnion and look from all other artists in this chapter because he does not want to create a realistic illusion; his aims are more spiritual.
Siobhan Hapaska - The Inquistior 1997. -life cast (painted wax) man dressed in the habit of a Dominican monk and seated on Marcel Breuer chair, an odd juxtaposition. Monk has a particularly stern and pedagogic manner befitting the title of the work. His right hand has a double set of fingers, while in his left hand he holds a strange white object, a little like an egg, which spouts a speech in Latin. Her life-cast figures are of religious.
Abigail Lane - Misfit 1994 - life-cast, wax, male figure, naked from the waist down, who restes uneasily on the floor. The sculpture was inspired by a similar figure seen in a London street, and to enhance his realism Lane has given him glass eyes, human hare and second-hand clothing. She likes to present odd tableaux, of which this is a prime example, and there is often the sense tat something untoward has happened. Her early work was concerned with physical evidence of the body. One installation consisted of wallpaper, printed with inked body parts such as buttocks, and others included casts of body fragments.
Marc Quinn - Self, 1991 - Over a five-month period he had eight pints of blood taken, which was poured into a cast of his head and kept frozen on top of a refrigeration unit. Inspired by a death mask of the mystical eighteen-century poet and painter William Blake. Self is and extremely personal meditation on mortality, tenuously held in frozen animation and dependent upon a regular flow of electricity. He uses his sculpture to examine the condition of being mortal and all that this entails with regard to the human body. He has used himself as a model for several works that address this theme.
No Visisble Means of Escapex XI, 1998 - Latex and rubber body casts of himself nude. Quinn has described this rubber cast as 'an extreme moment of transformation, a violent shedding of the skin', and by choosing to display it hanging from a rope, he alludes to death by hanging, an extreme moment of transformation of another kind.
Gavin Turk - Death of Che, 2000 - cast himself as Che Guevara, lying on a stretcher laid on cistern (wax), as the martyred hero. A life-size, wax self-portrait dressed as Sex Pistol Sid Vicious, and appropriating the posture of Andy Warhol's painting of Elvis as a cowboy with a gun. This is a good example of the way in which contemporary figurative sculpture intertwines imagery from popular culture and the mass media.
Tracey Emin - Death Mask, 2002 - death masks were popular for preserving the features of the famous and the infamous, and Emin is famous for being infamous.
Gil Shachar - Nir, 2001-2 - Israeli artist, chooses to emphasize the closed eyes, thus bringing to the work a sense of suspended hibernation, deep sleep or even death.
Teresa Margolles - Catafalco, 2000 - casts from death bodies, autopsied male corpses are set upright, so that the viewer can look into the hollow mould and find bodily traces, such as hairs and particles of skin that have adhered to the plaster during casting process. The stitching that follows the autopsy is also evident. These two figures may show some resemblance to medieval tomb sculptures of Egyptian mummies in form, but their raw presence is very much of our time. Conflates the sleep/death dichotomy with extremely powerful results. She trained as a forensic technician in a morgue in Mexico City, one of the world's most violent cities. There she finds evidence not only of acts of violence, but also failed organ transplants and botched cosmetic operations. She is a founding member of the multi-disciplinary group Semefo - Forensic Medical Service - who are devoted to exploring the aesthetics and taboos of death in Mexican society. Margolles achieves this by exhibiting real body parts. such as tongues, and by taking casts from death bodies.
Tony Mattelli - Sleepwalker, 1997 . Former assistant to Jeff Koons. He has become known for his hyperrealistic figurative sculpture, first emerging on the gallery scene with a tableau of three distressed boy scouts, Lost and Sick(1996). Most of his oeuvre since this date consists of self-portraits. His life-cast polyester figures are concerned with the troubled aspects of daily life.
Paul McCarthy - Dreaming, 2005. He has two ways of working - he makes sculptures or huge installations, or he acts out performances in galleries. Since 1990 casts of his own body. Life casting can be messy process, involving the painting of wet plaster or silicone onto nude and hairy flesh, and McCarthy is a sculptor who celebrates mess and materiality.
An Xian - Human Human -- Lotus, cloisonne figure 1, 2000-1. He uses Chinese traditional materials - porcelain, lacquer and cloisonne enamel and Chinese traditional decorative motifs.
Zhang Dali - Chinese Offspring no. 15, 2003. His life-casts of heads and bodies have the look of the morgue about them, and continue the sculptural theme of freezing the moment between life and death, between the animate and the inanimate. Dali casts the heads of a hundred of his fellow men. Dali created a studio in an old warehouse next to a migrant community and worked on site, recalling the process of Ahearn. These people have traveled from all over China to try to find work in the city, leaving their families in the countryside.
Ugo Rondinone - Bonjour Tristesse,1997 .Concepts of masquerade and disguise can be found in his sculptures. Series of cast figures of plump clowns, he sources his models via advertising, asking for large, middle-aged men, whom he casts and reproduces in Styrofoam. He then paints and clothes the casts. In his installations he places one of more of these figures as if sleeping on the floor or slumped against the walls of the gallery, seeming quite content in their repose. On occasions, he has also presented himself as a clown, and as a straightforward self-portrait, leaning against a gallery wall. The condition of sleep that seems to overwhelm most of Rondinone's life-cast figures alludes to the fact that the eyes have to be closed when a cast is made.
Keith Edmier - Beverly Edmier 1967, 1988 - life cast depicting his mother Beverly at the age of twenty-two in 1967, nine months pregnant with the artist himself as a foetus in her womb, making this one of the most unusual self-portraits in art. She lifts her blouse and gazes down at the child in her womb, and the pose carries allusions to that of the religious sculptural groups of the Virgin Mary and the Pieta -- motherhood and mortality, birth and death.
Anthony Gromley - Untitled (for Francis) - stands in the pose of St Francis of Assisi in Giovanni Bellini's painting St Francis in the Wilderness(c.1480), receiving the stigmata, or wounds, from the crucified Christ, and Gormley's cast has matching holes at these particular points. His work is based on casts taken from his own body. Even though each sculpture is self portrait, his casting process, which smoothes out all extraneous details, turns his figure into a universal everyman. Fiberglass figure is cast from the mould and this is then covered in sheets of lead, which are beaten into shape and welded, leaving the seams visible. Gormley thinks of this process as going to 'a place of darkness and of voluntary immobility. It's death in a way.' His life casts differ in intetnion and look from all other artists in this chapter because he does not want to create a realistic illusion; his aims are more spiritual.
Siobhan Hapaska - The Inquistior 1997. -life cast (painted wax) man dressed in the habit of a Dominican monk and seated on Marcel Breuer chair, an odd juxtaposition. Monk has a particularly stern and pedagogic manner befitting the title of the work. His right hand has a double set of fingers, while in his left hand he holds a strange white object, a little like an egg, which spouts a speech in Latin. Her life-cast figures are of religious.
Abigail Lane - Misfit 1994 - life-cast, wax, male figure, naked from the waist down, who restes uneasily on the floor. The sculpture was inspired by a similar figure seen in a London street, and to enhance his realism Lane has given him glass eyes, human hare and second-hand clothing. She likes to present odd tableaux, of which this is a prime example, and there is often the sense tat something untoward has happened. Her early work was concerned with physical evidence of the body. One installation consisted of wallpaper, printed with inked body parts such as buttocks, and others included casts of body fragments.
Marc Quinn - Self, 1991 - Over a five-month period he had eight pints of blood taken, which was poured into a cast of his head and kept frozen on top of a refrigeration unit. Inspired by a death mask of the mystical eighteen-century poet and painter William Blake. Self is and extremely personal meditation on mortality, tenuously held in frozen animation and dependent upon a regular flow of electricity. He uses his sculpture to examine the condition of being mortal and all that this entails with regard to the human body. He has used himself as a model for several works that address this theme.
No Visisble Means of Escapex XI, 1998 - Latex and rubber body casts of himself nude. Quinn has described this rubber cast as 'an extreme moment of transformation, a violent shedding of the skin', and by choosing to display it hanging from a rope, he alludes to death by hanging, an extreme moment of transformation of another kind.
Gavin Turk - Death of Che, 2000 - cast himself as Che Guevara, lying on a stretcher laid on cistern (wax), as the martyred hero. A life-size, wax self-portrait dressed as Sex Pistol Sid Vicious, and appropriating the posture of Andy Warhol's painting of Elvis as a cowboy with a gun. This is a good example of the way in which contemporary figurative sculpture intertwines imagery from popular culture and the mass media.
Tracey Emin - Death Mask, 2002 - death masks were popular for preserving the features of the famous and the infamous, and Emin is famous for being infamous.
Gil Shachar - Nir, 2001-2 - Israeli artist, chooses to emphasize the closed eyes, thus bringing to the work a sense of suspended hibernation, deep sleep or even death.
Teresa Margolles - Catafalco, 2000 - casts from death bodies, autopsied male corpses are set upright, so that the viewer can look into the hollow mould and find bodily traces, such as hairs and particles of skin that have adhered to the plaster during casting process. The stitching that follows the autopsy is also evident. These two figures may show some resemblance to medieval tomb sculptures of Egyptian mummies in form, but their raw presence is very much of our time. Conflates the sleep/death dichotomy with extremely powerful results. She trained as a forensic technician in a morgue in Mexico City, one of the world's most violent cities. There she finds evidence not only of acts of violence, but also failed organ transplants and botched cosmetic operations. She is a founding member of the multi-disciplinary group Semefo - Forensic Medical Service - who are devoted to exploring the aesthetics and taboos of death in Mexican society. Margolles achieves this by exhibiting real body parts. such as tongues, and by taking casts from death bodies.
Tony Mattelli - Sleepwalker, 1997 . Former assistant to Jeff Koons. He has become known for his hyperrealistic figurative sculpture, first emerging on the gallery scene with a tableau of three distressed boy scouts, Lost and Sick(1996). Most of his oeuvre since this date consists of self-portraits. His life-cast polyester figures are concerned with the troubled aspects of daily life.
Paul McCarthy - Dreaming, 2005. He has two ways of working - he makes sculptures or huge installations, or he acts out performances in galleries. Since 1990 casts of his own body. Life casting can be messy process, involving the painting of wet plaster or silicone onto nude and hairy flesh, and McCarthy is a sculptor who celebrates mess and materiality.
An Xian - Human Human -- Lotus, cloisonne figure 1, 2000-1. He uses Chinese traditional materials - porcelain, lacquer and cloisonne enamel and Chinese traditional decorative motifs.
Zhang Dali - Chinese Offspring no. 15, 2003. His life-casts of heads and bodies have the look of the morgue about them, and continue the sculptural theme of freezing the moment between life and death, between the animate and the inanimate. Dali casts the heads of a hundred of his fellow men. Dali created a studio in an old warehouse next to a migrant community and worked on site, recalling the process of Ahearn. These people have traveled from all over China to try to find work in the city, leaving their families in the countryside.
Strange Creatures
STRANGE CREATURES – source: Sculpture Today – Judith Collins
Last two decades artists concerned themselves with the influences and effects that microelectronic communications and bio technologies are having on the human body as well as on animals and plants. Boundaries between humans and animals are being transgressed. The categories of human/animal/machine are steadily merging into one another.
Cyborgs – Human beings whose bodies have been taken over by electromechanical devices – not new to literature – 1818 – Mary Shelley’s – Frankenstein – inspiration for writers, filmmakers and artists alike.
1985-Donna Haraway – American sociologist wrote essay entitled A Manifesto for Cyborgs: science, technology, and socialist feminism in the 1980’s in which she presented the cyborg as a trans human and transgender entity. Haraway’s ideas have reverberated through the art world, and recently she declared herself a cyborg, a fundamentally technological body plugged into the scientific power networks that control our world.
Luciano Fabro – Ovaries (1988) – shiny steel cables+ white marble ovals
- eggs are identical and infinitely reproducible and call up ideas about mass production , genetic cloning and fertility experiments
- Fabro uses inorganic and industrial materials to make a statement about the reproductive capacity of female body, not necessary a human one in fact, the scale and grandeur of the work turns the implied body into that of a mechanical giant.
Paul Mc Carthy – Spaghetti Man (1993)
Young Japanese artists – Naturally inclined to work with new technologies and materials living as they do in one of the most advanced technological countries on the world. Momoyo Torimitsu, Takashi Murakami, Chiezo Taro.
Artificial creatures inspired from Japanese youth culture and its obsession with animation, comic books and cartoons. Japanese animated cartoons first appeared in the 1960’s, portraying and imaginary world filled with superheroes and cyborgs living a life of innocence and fun. Japanese cartoons and comics inspired by American culture Walt Disney’s animated films.
Contemporary Japanese artists turn the cute, innocuous quality of their source material into something darker and more anarchic. They also add a touch of Andy Warhol and Jeff Koons.
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| crawling businessman robot | Momoyo Torimitsu |
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| Takashi Murakami |
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| Murakami - DOB |
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| Chiezo Taro - Superlamb |
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| Lee Bul - Amaryllis 1999 |
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| Yue Minjun - uses his own likeness in his work - figures smile boradly |
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| Ken Feingold - Sinking Feeling 2001, author uses silicone, pigments, fibreglass, software and electronics. In other instalations like If/Then - two disembodied identical heads in a cardboard box that talk to each other in an attempt to determine who they are: 'I wanted them to look like replacement parts being shipped from the factory that had suddenly gotten up and begun a kind of existential dialogue right there on the assembly line', the artist said. |
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| Tim Hawkinson - Penitent 1994 - Kneeling skeleton from dog chews repents his or her sins and seek forgivness - whistles 'as if calling for a dog'. Los Angeles - leading centre for the cyborg/hybrids artistic production = artists technicians hired by the film industry to produce special effects. Recycled domestic items is his favourite material. |
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| Paloma Varga-Weisz - Bumpman sick - 2002 - who sits in calm contemplation. Nothing to do with modern technology. She carves wooden figures and animals from limewood, and act that harks back to her predecessors in the world of medieval religious German sculpture. Her figures are amalgam of acient and modern - she looks for inspiration on medical websites and children stories. |
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| Patricia Piccinini - Still Life with Stem Cells, 2002, a life-like child sits among grotesque, embryonic lumps with veined and hairy skin. Patricia is looking at the latest developments in genetic engineering and presenting creatures that appear to display the unpleasant side-effects. |
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| Jake and Dinos Chapman - Zygotic acceleration, Biogenetic de-sublimated libidinal model 1995 (enlarged x 1000). 'Dysfunctional' is an adjective that has often been applied to the mutated bodies by Chapmans who often reconfigure shop-window mannequins in their work.They make obvious references to genetic engineering , and they are also aware of the way in which the Christian Church has commissioned from artists millions of mutilated and wounded bodies, most notably that of Christ himself. |
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| Tomas Grunfeld - Misfit 1990. Monsters of animal kind - combines taxidermied animals in unlikely and grotesque configurations. In this case three different species fox, pheasant and duck. |
The First notable hybrid in world sculpture appeared as long as circa 5,000 BC, the Egyptian Sphinx, with the body of a lion, female breasts and the head of the ruling pharaoh. Then followed centaurs, minotaurs, fauns, satyrs, all hedonistic creatures who live by their instincts. In medieval times, sculptors carved numerous anthropomorphic creatures to help promote moral virtues. And in more recent times, cartoon figures of rabbits, mice, dogs and cats have enlarged the repertoire of the human-animal amalgam, one of the most notable being Mickey Mouse. Another kind of mouse, the 'oncomouse', a patented creature bread in an American laboratory and given a human immune system for the purpose of cancer research, served as the inspiration for Brian Crockett's large marble sculpture ecce homo, a life-size amalgam of man and mouse.
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| Brian Crockett - ecce homo 2000 - Crockett made the work in 2000, the millennium year, and decided to 'reinterpret the ultimate figure of salvation, Christ, through the ultimate actor of contemporary science, the oncomouse'. Material pink-tinted crystalline marble dust cast with polymer binding, another nod towards modern technology. |
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Carlee Fernandez - 7100 Goat , 1999- uses taxidermic animals, altered in various ways so that they function as weird household objects, such as a deer/laundry basket, a deer/ice-cube tray, and a stuffed rhino converted into a stepladder. Theseare the types of animals that indigenous peoples ate, or trophy hunters shot, stuffed and displayed in their homes. Fernandes brings human and animal into more sympathetic relationship by turning them into useful domestic items. |
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| Alain Sechas, Hugh, The Guitarist Cat, 1997 |
Kiki Smith stated in 2002: When I first started making figurative work...I was interested in the symbolic morphing of animals and humans. I found this anthropomorphizing of animals interesting; the human attributes we give to animals and the animal attributes we take on as humans to construct our identities....What do animals mean to us in terms of the construction of our own identity, our well-being, our environment?
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| Kiki Smith - Harpie - Sirens and harpies seductive figures from Greek mythology that combine the head of woman with the body and claws of a bird. The Harpies were known for their destructive qualities and the Sirens were the malevolent monsters of the sea, luring sailors to their death with their beautiful songs. Nowadays they carry a message of potent femininity and archetypal power. |
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| Rona Pondick, Monkey with Hair, 2002-3 |
Liz Craft, Foxy Lady 2003
Rosemarie Trockel, Creature of Habit - Drunken Dog 1, 1990
Daisy Youngblood, Romana, 1987
Daisy Youngblood, Tied Goat 1983
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| Jane Alexander, Bom Boys, 1998 |
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| Jane Alexander, Butcher Boys, 1985-86 |
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| Eric Swenson, Edgar, 1998 |
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| Young Sun Lim, Room of the Host, 2000 |
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| Jan Pylypchuk, Hey, don't fuck with the pipsqueak!, 2004 |
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