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.
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