"The eye that gathers impressions is no longer the eye that sees a depiction on a surface; it becomes a hand, the ray of light becomes a finger, and the imagination becomes a form of immediate touching."--Johann Gottfried Herder
Long recognized as one of the most important eighteenth-century works on aesthetics and the visual arts, Johann Gottfried Herder's "Plastik" (Sculpture, 1778) has never before appeared in a complete English translation. In this landmark essay, Herder combines rationalist and empiricist thought with a wide range of sources--from the classics to Norse legend, Shakespeare to the Bible--to illuminate the ways we experience sculpture.
Standing on the fault line between classicism and romanticism, Herder draws most of his examples from classical sculpture, while nevertheless insisting on the historicity of art and of the senses themselves. Through a detailed analysis of the differences between painting and sculpture, he develops a powerful critique of the dominance of vision both in the appreciation of art and in our everyday apprehension of the world around us. One of the key articulations of the aesthetics of Sturm und Drang, "Sculpture" is also important as an anticipation of subsequent developments in art theory.
Jason Gaiger's translation of "Sculpture" includes an extensive introduction to Herder's thought, explanatory notes, and illustrations of all the sculptures discussed in the text.

Idol Structures accompanies an exhibition at the DePaul Art Museum of recent photographs and sculptures by Chicago-based artist Matt Siber, whose work explores the systems of corporate and mass-media communication that permeate the urban landscape. Instead of focusing on the information itself, Siber emphasizes the physical infrastructure of these systems. Photographs of the narrow edges of signs, sculptures of billboard ads hanging so loosely that their text is obscured in the folds, and other unique treatments of promotional materials distort and subvert the intended messages. The artist's deconstruction of such commercial efforts reveals an element of communication meant to remain invisible and subservient to image, text, and graphics. By highlighting the everyday objects used to persuade and influence, Siber's art undermines these communication systems' ability to do precisely what they were intended to do.

Beginning in the seventeenth century, the greatest French writers and artists became embroiled in a debate that turned on the priority of painting or sculpture, touch or sight, color or design, ancients or moderns. Jacqueline Lichtenstein guides readers through these historic quarrels, decoding the key terms of the heated discussions and revealing how the players were influenced by the concurrent explosion of scientific discoveries concerning the senses of sight and touch. Drawing on the work of Rene Descartes, Roger de Piles, Denis Diderot, Charles Baudelaire, and emile Zola, among others, "The Blind Spot" lets readers eavesdrop on an energetic and contentious conversation that preoccupied French intellectuals for three hundred years.

Digital technologies have profoundly impacted the arts and expanded the field of sculpture since the 1950s. Art history, however, continues to pay little attention to sculptural works that are conceived and ‘materialized’ using digital technologies. How can we rethink the artistic medium in relation to our technological present and its historical precursors? A number of theoretical approaches discuss the implications of the so-called ‘Aesthetics of the Digital’, referring, above all, to screen-based phenomena. For the first time, this publication brings together international and trans-historical research perspectives to explore how digital technologies re-configure the understanding of sculpture and the sculptural leading into the (post-)digital age. Up-to-date research on digital technologies’ expansion of the concept of sculpture Linking historical sculptural debates with discourse on the new media and (post-)digital culture

Gene Koss creates majestic works in glass and steel that require demanding techniques to realise their monumental scale. These massive volumes of glass are married with elaborately engineered steel elements. Koss casts molten glass directly from the hot furnace, working with teams of highly-skilled assistants and rigging together intricate systems for transporting his finished abstract works for display in museums, galleries and public spaces. The artistic works deal with the self-sacrificing work of the American farmers in whose milieu the artist grew up. The first monograph published on the work of this groundbreaking glass artist features Koss's most important achievements and, through insightful essays by curators and critics, places them in historic perspective.

From the 1960s and 1970s onwards, different sculptors became involved with a mode of realism based on the physically lifelike ap pearance of the human body. By deploying traditional techniques of modelling, casting and painting in order to recreate human figures they follow different approaches towards a contemporary form of figural realism. The sculptures show how the way we see ou r bodies has been subject to constant change. The publication presents artworks of all important representatives of Hyperrealism. From the early pioneers like George Segal, Duane Hanson and John DeAndrea this comprehensive selection demonstrates how Hyperr ealistic sculptures continuously developed up to the current stars of the movement like Ron Mueck, Sam Jinks, Evan Penny, Tony Matelli and Patricia Piccinini.

Charles C. Eldredge Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in American Art from the Smithsonian American Art Museum In Race ExpertsLinda Kim examines the complicated and ambivalent role played by sculptor Malvina Hoffman in the Races of Mankind series created for the Chicago Field Museum in 1930. Although Hoffman had training in fine arts and was a protege of Auguste Rodin and Ivan Mestrovic, she had no background in anthropology or museum exhibits. Nonetheless, the Field Museum commissioned her to make a series of life-size sculptures for the museum's new racial exhibition, which became the largest exhibit on race ever installed in a museum and one of the largest sculptural commissions ever undertaken by a single artist. Hoffman's Races of Mankind exhibit was realized as a series of 104 bronzes of racial types from around the world, a unique visual mediation between anthropological expertise and lay ideas about race in interwar America. Kim explores how the exhibition compelled the artist to incorporate into her artistic model of race not only racial science but also popular ideas that ordinary Americans brought to the museum. Kim situates the Races of Mankind exhibit at the juncture of these different forms of expertise and examines how the sculptures represented the messy resolutions between them. Race Experts is a compelling story of ideological contradiction and accommodation within the racial practices of American museums, artists, and audiences.

Alfred Haberpointner (*1966 in Salzburg) is a sculptor of international repute. He became famous with his wooden sculptures, and he has subsequently expanded his work to include the use of materials like steel, lead and paper. This volume documents Haberpointner's artistic development through all phases up to and including his large - scale works in the public space. Alfred Haberpointner's deep - seated association with wood as a material has its roots in his biography. He grew up in the region around Salzburg and began at an early age to collect wood and to examine and shape it. After abandoning his originally naturalistic approach, in the 1990s he began to produce studies and first works series on the subjects of proportion and weight. His textural approach increasingly began to assume priority in his technique. The result was large spatial objects and wall sculptures with expressive surface structures and colours. In a major exclusive interview the artist speaks about all aspects and the background of his work.

Facing Fear is the first time the sculptures of Lynn Chadwick and Alberto Giacometti have ever been explicitly compared and contrasted. In 1956, Lynn Chadwick (1914-2003) won the International Sculpture Prize at the Venice Biennale. The youngest artist ever to receive the prize, this British sculptor had begun his career only six years earlier. The runners-up included Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966), who was then already a renowned artist and the overwhelming favourite to win. Yet the question of which one received the prize - Giacometti won shortly afterwards, in 1962 - is less significant than the fact that both of them were nominated for it. Each of the two represented, in his own way, the confusion and disillusionment that prevailed in Cold War Europe. For Giacometti, these tensions set off a deep existential crisis that led to a radical shift in his work. His string-like forms, now well known, literally pare down the human being to his essence. In that same period, Chadwick's constructivist figures were described as 'the geometry of fear', a desperate cry expressing the sense of menace that had the artist and his contemporaries in a stranglehold. Text in English and Dutch.

Pedro S. de Movellan is considered one of the worlds most well known kinetic sculptors alive today; this is a complete survey of his works from 1990 to 2012. The son of an abstract painter and an architect, de Movellan perfectly balances both of their influences in his own work. Each piece is unique, precisely constructed to be refined and detailed, yet unpredictable in its motion. From the rich mahogany, maple inlays, and leaf-shaped fans of Swiss Movement to the artists first outdoor sculpture, the eight-foot-tall Lily in polished aluminum and gold leaf to the most recent carbon fiber works weighing mere ounces, included here is every sculpture de Movellan has made throughout his career. The book also features text on de Movellans various styles and techniques and offers insights on his use of size, shape, material, color, and range of motion. Also included are detailed conceptual sketches and schematics for selected works as well as ephemera marking milestones in his career. For the collector, curator, and fan of kinetic sculpture and contemporary art, this volume serves as a must-have first part to de Movellans catalogue raisonne.

One of the earliest portrait photographs -- a daguerreotype -- represents the Danish artist Bertel Thorvaldsen. In spite of the fact that the photograph is signed and dated there has been doubts about the dating and the location of the taking of the picture. Starting from the photography itself as well as the historical facts the author sets the photography in its proper context. Written sources material and other pictures are presented to throw light on the photographer, the French businessman A C T Neubourg's work in Scandinavia. Furthermore, the reader gains an insight into the exposure as it is being reflected in the picture where an older conception of art meets the new age of photography. The book also contains an appendix by Jens Frederiksen (The Royal Academy of Fine Arts School of Architecture, Copenhagen) on A C T Neubourg's camera, lens and daguerreotypes.

The famous Lion Monument in Lucerne, located in a park in the heart of the city, commemorates the Swiss Guards in the service of the French King Louis XVI who fell in the storming of the Tuileries Palace in Paris on August 10, 1792. The monument, hewn directly into the rockface according to a design by the Danish sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen, was inaugurated on August 10, 1821. Together with the nearby Glacier Garden, it is today one of the Swiss city’s major tourist attractions. To mark the memorial’s bicentenary, the Kunsthalle Lucerne launched the Lion Monument 21 program of exhibitions, performances, podiums, and interdisciplinary events. Between 2017 and 2021, they considered the monument from an artistic standpoint. The art projects demonstrated a wide range of artistic stances and related the monument to a variety of themes. This book documents the entire project through some 400 images, texts, and conversations. It also constitutes a socially committed reference book for the artistic contextualisation of monuments, which records and reflects on the insights of the Lion Monument 21 project. Text in English and German.

This volume brings together the work of leading scholars on two of the most important, yet puzzling, extant ensembles of Hellenistic Age sculpture: the Great Altar at Pergamon, with its Gigantomachy and scenes from the life of Telephos, and the Cave at Sperlonga in Italy, with its epic themes connected especially with the adventures of Odysseus. "From Pergamon to Sperlonga "has three aims: to update the scholarship on two important monuments of ancient art and architecture; to debate questions of iconography, authorship, and date; and to broaden the scope of discussion on these monuments beyond the boundaries of studies done in the past. In addition, the volume brings forward new ideas about how these two monuments are connected and discusses possible means by which stylistic influences were transmitted between them.

Remains: Zsolt Berszán provides in-depth insights into the works that the Romanian artist (*1974) created between 2014 and 2021. Roughly 100 artworks — paintings, sculptures, and mix-media objects — shaped by the idea of dissolution and decay are presented in three chapters. The artist again and again insinuates the human body, which becomes visible in a macabre play of distortions, contortions, and torn fragments. Zsolt Berszán is not interested in the individual itself, but in human remains, which themselves become the topic. Text in English and German.

"The rhythm of the body moving through space has been the motivating source of most of my work."-Richard Serra Drawn from talks between celebrated artist Richard Serra and acclaimed art historian Hal Foster held over a fifteen-year period, this volume offers revelations into Serra's prolific six-decade career and the ideas that have informed his working practice. Conversations about Sculpture is both an intimate look at Serra's life and work, with candid reflections on personal moments of discovery, and a provocative examination of sculptural form from antiquity to today. Serra and Foster explore such subjects as the artist's work in steel mills as a young man; the impact of music, dance, and architecture on his art; the importance of materiality and site specificity to his aesthetic; the controversies and contradictions his work has faced; and his belief in sculpture as experience. They also discuss sources of inspiration-from Donatello and Brancusi to Japanese gardens and Machu Picchu-revealing a history of sculpture across time and culture through the eyes of one of the medium's most brilliant figures. Introduced with an insightful preface by Foster, this probing dialogue is beautifully illustrated with duotone images that bring to life both Serra's work and his key commitments.

The book presents a masterful photographic campaign through which Marco Anelli documented the public works of Costantino (Tino) Nivola (1911-1988) in New York. Through a skilful modulation between light and shadow, distinctive of Anelli's language, the images - strictly in black and white - offer a profound and evocative understanding of the sculptor's work - a leading figure in the 20th century art scene - but also of the context that houses them, thanks to the involvement of the surrounding community that participated in the work of the photographer. The project therefore investigates the works by Nivola scattered throughout the five districts of the city (Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, The Bronx, Staten Island) with the aim of highlighting them, relaunching their knowledge and encouraging their preservation through shared awareness.

Text in English & German. The architect is at all times also an artist. How otherwise would he be able to tame the three-dimensionality of space and subdue the urges of physics and structural mechanics with the creations of his fantasy? This creativity is however mostly restricted purely to its own field. Rob Krier, is an exception. Since the beginning of his career in construction, he has always seen his love of art as a vocation -- one which he nurtures parallel to his work. Fine art should stand in dialogue with architecture and it is Krier's ambition to have iconographic themes brought into the latter, so that they might speak equally to both the occupants of a building and to bystanders, moving them to thoughtful reflection. In his Pictorial Journal 19541971, Rob Krier describes in compelling words and pictures how he came to have a twin passion for fine art and architecture and told of his grammar school years in Echternach, his studies in Munich and his first taste of professional life with Oswald Mathias Ungers and Frei Otto. In his Pictorial Journal 19541971, which covers the period of Krier's work as a lecturer and assistant to Prof. Johannes Uhl at Stuttgart University, the text is restricted to a minimum. The pictures are less colourful, more composed. The 'daily scribbles' dominate -- mainly sketches and drawings of people and animals, buildings, landscapes, objects and also fantasies. The volume is rounded off with a detailed resume. Born and raised in Luxembourg, Krier moved to Vienna after having studied in Munich and worked for Oswald Mathias Ungers and Frei Otto. After teaching posts in Stuttgart and Lausanne, he was a professor at the Technische Universitat in Vienna from 1976 to 1998 and, in 1986, held a guest professorship at Yale University in New Haven, Mass. Krier has developed urban-design concepts for Stuttgart, Vienna, Berlin, Amiens, Montpellier, Leeds, Gothenburg, Lodz, Amsterdam, Den Haag and many other cities. Projects with which he was first able to translate his vision of a spatial concept, such as Rauchstrasse in Berlin, Breitenfurterstrasse in Vienna or Ritterstrasse with Schinkelplatz in Berlin, repeatedly found their place in international publications.

In the waters surrounding the Pacific island of Espiritu Santo, Spanish sculptor Cristina Iglesias (born 1956) is installing an underwater labyrinth. Comprised of three submerged cement rooms, it is intended to be encrusted and inhabited by various forms of marine life. Iglesias' Matador "Artist's Portfolio "presents 18 preliminary color drawings done for this ambitious project.

Austin artist David Everett was born and raised in Texas, and his work reflects an organic and wholly original Lone Star State ethos. His stunning vision and exquisite craftsmanship evoke nature's essential grace and harmony in beautiful sculptures, bas-relief carvings, woodcuts, and drawings. Steve Davis, former president of the Texas Institute of Letters, writes of Everett, "David has never been one of those artists-as-marketers who relentlessly hype themselves. Instead, he has let the quality of his work speak for itself. And it does more than speak-it sings." Everett's creations inspire a passionate devotion among his many fans and collectors. He appears in high-profile exhibitions across Texas and the Southwest and his work is found in many public, corporate, and private collections.An introduction by prominent novelist Stephen Harrigan sets the perfect tone for an absorbing consideration of Everett's oeuvre in The Art of David Everett: Another World. Author and editor Becky Duval Reese, respected art curator, writer, and retired director of the El Paso Museum of Art, contributes an insightful essay on Everett and his place in Texas art, followed by an absorbing interview with curator, author, and teacher Richard Holland, both offering revealing and satisfying insights into the shaping and development of the artist's unique viewpoint and methods. The heart of the book is the abundant collection of breathtaking, full-color reproductions of Everett's work. Here, the reader gains a vivid view of how Everett's artistic instincts have been nurtured by life experiences and a maturing aesthetic rooted in tradition.

Pushed to the height of its illusionistic powers during the first centuries of the Roman Empire, sculpture was largely abandoned with the ascendancy of Christianity, as the apparent animation of the material image and practices associated with sculpture were considered both superstitious and idolatrous. In Pygmalion's Power, Thomas E. A. Dale argues that the reintroduction of architectural sculpture after a hiatus of some seven hundred years arose with the particular goal of engaging the senses in a Christian religious experience. Since the term "Romanesque" was coined in the nineteenth century, the reintroduction of stone sculpture around the mid-eleventh century has been explained as a revivalist phenomenon, one predicated on the desire to claim the authority of ancient Rome. In this study, Dale proposes an alternative theory. Covering a broad range of sculpture types-including autonomous cult statuary in wood and metal, funerary sculpture, architectural sculpture, and portraiture-Dale shows how the revitalized art form was part of a broader shift in emphasis toward spiritual embodiment and affective piety during the late eleventh and twelfth centuries. Adding fresh insight to scholarship on the Romanesque, Pygmalion's Power borrows from trends in cultural anthropology to demonstrate the power and potential of these sculptures to produce emotional effects that made them an important sensory part of the religious culture of the era.

For over a century the majority of America's major sculptors chose one particular foundry to cast their works in bronze. That foundry was the Roman Bronze Works and its castings (and often the initials R.B.W.) represent a vast and fascinating collection of sculptures, ranging from the monuments of French and Saint-Gaudens to the cowboys of Remington and Russell, from the grand and graceful figures of Paul Manship and the charming salon pieces of Bessie Potter Vonnoh, to the brilliant abstractions of Archipenko and Calder. To study the ledgers and archival photographs of Roman Bronze Works is to see the unfolding of American sculpture through the 20th century, for here are examples from the many schools and isms that locked the nation's art world in titanic battles between realism and modernism and the many significant styles in between. Over 700 photographic examples (many in color) and biographical information about over 120 sculptors make up this book, the first to examine R.B.W.'s role in American art.

Myriam Holme (*1971) walks a fine line between painting and sculpture. Her concept of painting is based on the experimental and processual, with both being observed from the material perspective. Her painting can be thought of as expansive and incomplete; it does not settle into what already exists but remains in constant motion. Holme has already received numerous awards for her work, and her pieces are on display in national and international museums and exhibition spaces. The monograph Myriam Holme, 2010–2020 features works from the past decade along with essays by Christiane Schürkmann and Jörg van den Berg. Text in English and German.