Learning to Look at Sculpture is an accessible guide to the study and understanding of three dimensional art. Sculpture is all around us: in public parks, squares, gardens and railway stations, as part of the architecture of buildings, or when used in commemoration and memorials and can even be considered in relation to furniture and industrial design. This book encourages you to consider the multiple forms and everyday guises sculpture can take.

Exploring Western sculpture with examples from antiquity through to the present day, Mary Acton shows you how to analyse and fully experience sculpture, asking you to consider questions such as What do we mean by the sculptural vision? What qualities do we look for when viewing sculpture? How important is the influence of the Classical Tradition and what changed in the modern period? What difference does the scale and context make to our visual understanding?

With chapters on different types of sculpture, such as free-standing figures, group sculpture and reliefs, and addressing how the experience of sculpture is fundamentally different due to the nature of its relationship to the space of its setting, the book also explores related themes, such as sculpture s connection with architecture, drawing and design, and what difference changing techniques can make to the tactile and physical experience of sculpture.

Richly illustrated with over 200 images, including multiple points of view of three dimensional works, examples include the Riace bronzes, Michelangelo s "David," Canova s "The Three Graces," medieval relief sculptures, war memorials and works from modern and contemporary artists, such as Henry Moore, Cornelia Parker and Richard Serra, and three-dimensional designers like Thomas Heatherwick.

A glossary of critical and technical terms, further reading and questions for students, make this the ideal companion for all those studying, or simply interested in, sculpture."

How to cast bronze? This complete tutorial will show you a simple, safe and easy way to cast a small, fist size sculpture in bronze at little cost and little effort. The method described in this manual is called the thin ceramic shell, lost wax technique. This is the same technique implemented by modern art foundries; it has simply been adapted to make it possible in the backyard and is the easiest way for the home founder to make a small sculpture to a high degree of quality at little cost and with easily found tools and materials. This manual focuses on a simple yet rewarding 5 days project that will allow the home enthusiast to cast a small piece safely, quickly, cheaply and to a high standard of quality. The manual will introduce you to the basics of wax working, sprueing a wax model, mixing and applying a ceramic slurry, making your own crucible and making an efficient yet affordable furnace, melting and pouring the metal and finally chasing and fettling the bronze before applying a simple patina. The second part of the manual discusses more advanced casting techniques and gives further advice and guidance on how to set up a small scale home foundry. The tools and materials necessary are easy to find. An appendix lists many stores where specialised materials can be purchased in different countries.

A daring reassessment of Louise Nevelson, an icon of twentieth-century art whose innovative procedures relate to gendered, classed, and racialized forms of making In this radical rethinking of the art of Louise Nevelson (1899–1988), Julia Bryan-Wilson provides a long-overdue critical account of a signature figure in postwar sculpture. A Ukraine-born Jewish immigrant, Nevelson persevered in the male-dominated New York art world. Nonetheless, her careful procedures of construction—in which she assembled found pieces of wood into elaborate structures, usually painted black—have been little studied. Organized around a series of key operations in Nevelson’s own process (dragging, coloring, joining, and facing), the book comprises four slipcased, individually bound volumes that can be read in any order. Both form and content thus echo Nevelson’s own modular sculptures, the gridded boxes of which the artist herself rearranged. Exploring how Nevelson’s making relates to domesticity, racialized matter, gendered labor, and the environment, Bryan-Wilson offers a sustained examination of the social and political implications of Nevelson’s art. The author also approaches Nevelson’s sculptures from her own embodied subjectivity as a queer feminist scholar. She forges an expansive art history that places Nevelson’s assemblages in dialogue with a wide array of marginalized worldmaking and underlines the artist’s proclamation of allegiance to blackness.

John Pickering has been described as a modern-day alchemist who hews his sculptures from pure mathematical principles. His technique is to conjugate a numerical sequence and to cast its form in space. As the form unfolds, it invites us to explore surfaces as sculpture, and to interpret volumes and spaces as architecture. Because of the mathematical rigour that underpins the form, it is already potent, engineered, rational and ultimately, buildable. "The Inversion Principle" conveys, through photographs, the full impact of Pickering's sculptures. But equally it describes the meticulous process of making them. It defines the inspirations behind the works (which include Naum Gabo, space probes, satellites and Stockhausen). It dicusses their engineering implications. Finally, it places them within the architectural tradition of the visionary form.

An Unreasoned Act of Being is an account of the life and career of Himmat Shah. Shah was a major sculptor and draughtsman of twentieth-century India. He was born in 1933 and rejected traditional schooling, opting instead to train at art school. He spent time in Paris discovering the canon of western art but also founded Group 1890, established to promote a form of Indian art distinct from the western schools. The most recognizable of his work is the series of heads sculpted in bronze and terracotta. As emblems of masculinity they appear totemic and phallic. He uses printmaking techniques to score the surfaces of these pieces. This book looks in depth at his life and work, along with stylistic aspects and technique. It offers an account of a seminal Indian artist.

This book explores the achievements of a group of young women artists who learned about the New Art through an extraordinary faculty of innovators at Douglass College. New Art rejected the dominance of Abstract Expressionism, advocating that art should be based on everyday life and that "anything can be art."

Over the course of 60-plus years, Erwin Hauer has created modular sculptures that feature penetrations and prominent interior voids yet, remarkably, are bonded by continuous surfaces. The modules of these sculptures contain the seeds of infinity: what Hauer calls 'continua'. Still Facing Infinity covers the full scope of Hauer's artistic oeuvre, from early two-dimensional works that double as room dividers to three-dimensional, space-filling sculptures that are conceptually similar to innovative architecture and engineering (works by Antoni Gaudi, Felix Candela, and Frei Otto) as well as advanced mathematical concepts (triply periodic infinite surfaces without self-intersections). Hauer offers detailed presentations in writings as well as in abundant photographs of a number of significant works, including Jerusalem Tower and Infinite Surface I-WP, the basis for numerous tabletop and large-scale sculptures as well as for two independent series that explore multiple iterations of the infinite surface concept.

Robert Gober rose to prominence in the mid-1980s and was quickly acknowledged as one of the most significant artists of his generation. Early in his career, he made deceptively simple sculptures of everyday objects--beginning with sinks and moving on to domestic furniture such as playpens, beds and doors. In the 1990s, his practice evolved from single works to theatrical room-sized environments. In all of his work, Gober's formal intelligence is never separate from a penetrating reading of the socio-political context of his time. His objects and installations are among the most psychologically charged artworks of the late twentieth century, reflecting the artist's sustained concerns with issues of social justice, freedom and tolerance. Published in conjunction with the first large-scale survey of the artist's career to take place in the United States, this publication presents his works in all media, including individual sculptures and immersive sculptural environments, as well as a distinctive selection of drawings, prints and photographs. Prepared in close collaboration with the artist, it traces the development of a remarkable body of work, highlighting themes and motifs that emerged in the early 1980s and continue to inform Gober's work today. An essay by Hilton Als is complemented by an in-depth chronology featuring a rich selection of images from the artist's archives, including never-before-published photographs of works in progress.
Robert Gober was born in 1954 in Wallingford, Connecticut. He has had numerous one-person exhibitions, most notably at the Dia Center for the Arts, New York; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and Schaulager, Basel. In 2001, he represented the United States at the 49th Venice Biennale. Gober's curatorial projects have been shown at The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; The Menil Collection, Houston; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. He lives and works in New York.

Born in New York in 1941, Joel Shapiro is one of the most significant artists of his generation. Since the first public showing of his work in 1969 as part of the landmark Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials exhibiton at the Whitney Museum of American Art, he has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions in galleries and museums around the world. Most renowned for having developed in the 1980s and '90s a distinctive language of dynamic sculpture that blurs the lines between abstraction and figuration, Shapiro became known through his earliest 1970s New York shows for introducing common forms of often diminutive size. Since then he has continued to push the material and conceptual boundaries of sculpture by working in a number of materials and employing various working methods. Joel Shapiro: Sculpture and Works on Paper 1969-2019 is the first book in over twenty years to survey the artist's entire working career. In an extensive essay, art historian Richard Shiff provides a fresh and incisive examination of Shapiro's oeuvre and working process. With more than two hundred striking full-colour illustrations, this is a long-anticipated and much-needed survey of this vital and essential American artist.

Teresa Moorehouse's "narrative sculptures" tell deep, often timeless stories in cold cast bronze, with patinas of copper, silver, or gold. Some draw on traditional myths or legends. Others discover new voices for contemporary experience of spiritual mysteries. Her images weave a language of symbols that surpasses logic and speaks directly to intuition and spirit. Soul Stories elegantly displays thirty-nine of the artist's favourite works in cold cast bronze. Her own brief narratives companion the photographs, to lead us by the hand into each sculpture's magical world.

For the first time, the 92-metre frieze of the Voortrekker Monument in Pretoria, one of the largest historical narratives in marble, has been made the subject of a book. The pictorial narrative of the Boer pioneers who conquered South Africa's interior during the 'Great Trek' (1835-52) represents a crucial period of South Africa's past. Conceptualising the frieze both reflected on and contributed to the country's socio-political debates in the 1930s and 1940s when it was made. The book considers the active role the Monument played in the rise of Afrikaner nationalism and the development of apartheid, as well as its place in post-apartheid heritage. The frieze is unique in that it provides rare evidence of the complex processes followed in creating a major monument. Based on unpublished documents, drawings and models, these processes are unfolded step by step, from the earliest discussions of the purpose and content of the frieze, through all the stages of its design, to its shipping to post-war Italy to be copied into marble from Monte Altissimo, up to its final installation in the Monument. The book examines how visual representation transforms historical memory in what it chooses to recount, and the forms in which it is depicted. The second volume expands on the first, by investigating each of the twenty-seven scenes of the frieze in depth, providing new insights into not only the frieze, but also South Africa's history. Francois van Schalkwyk of African Minds, co-publisher with De Gruyter writes: From Memory to Marble is an open access monograph in the true sense of the word. Both volumes of the digital version of the book are available in full and free of charge from the date of publication. This approach to publishing democratises access to the latest scholarly publications across the globe. At the same time, a book such as From Memory to Marble, with its unique and exquisite photographs of the frieze as well as its wealth of reproduced archival materials, demands reception of a more traditional kind, that is, on the printed page. For this reason, the book is likewise available in print as two separate volumes. The printed and digital books should not be seen as separate incarnations; each brings its own advantages, working together to extend the reach and utility of From Memory to Marble to a range of interested readers.

Italian-born American artist Harry Bertoia (1915-1978) was one of the most prolific, innovative artists of the post-war period. Trained at the Cranbrook Academy of Art, where he met future colleagues and collaborators Charles and Ray Eames, Florence Knoll, and Eero Saarinen, he went on to make one-of-a kind jewellery, design iconic chairs, create thousands of unique sculptures including large-scale commissions for significant buildings, and advance the use of sound as sculptural material. His work speaks to the confluence of numerous fields of endeavour, but is united throughout by a sculptural approach to making and an experimental embrace of metal. Harry Bertoia: Sculpting Mid-Century Modern Life accompanies the first U.S. museum retrospective of the artist's career to examine the full scope of his broad, interdisciplinary practice, and feature important examples of his furniture, jewellery, monotypes, and diverse sculptural output. Lavishly illustrated, the book offers new scholarly essays as well as a catalogue of the artists numerous large-scale commissions. It questions how and why we distinguish between a chair, a necklace, a screen, and a freestanding sculpture and what Bertoia's sculptural things, when taken together, say about the fluidity of visual language across culture, both at mid-century and now.

A stunning volume celebrating the work of Agostino Bonalumi during the 1960s and 1970s and its connection with other artists of the Azimut group. A selection of Bonalumi's paintings from the 1960s and 1970s--including some unpublished and never before exhibited--form the core of this volume and confirm the important role played by this internationally lesser known artist in the development of modern art in Italy.

Aesthetic seduction, superb workmanship, and historical interest are the three central themes in the collection of Fondation Gandur pour l'Art (Geneva), created in 2010 and still expanding. The aim of this first volume is to catalogue the works in the collection, whose decorative aspects are every bit as important as their narrative content. The works are for the most part sculptures - statuettes and ornamental reliefs - although two-dimensional decorations depicting figurative scenes associated with classical antiquity or Christianity are no less important. The periods represented by the sculptural works discussed in this book reflect the scope of the whole collection, which ranges from the 12th to the 18th century. And since the goal of the collection is to document centuries of cultural exchange between France and neighbouring countries, all the works included in the book come from these latter regions. The hybrid styles are closely linked, and this is an aspect of considerable importance, as is the originality certain pieces display and, last but not least, their aesthetic quality. The book is arranged by topic, which brings out the great originality and extraordinary richness of the collection, as well as the extremely varied nature of the subjects, narrative episodes, and figures portrayed. More specifically, the topics are divided into five sections: ancient gods and heroes; biblical and allegorical figures; scenes from the life of the Virgin; episodes from the life of Christ; and saints and intercessors. Each work has its own entry that describes the historical and geographical context in which it was made, analyses its iconographic content, and includes a bibliography and a list of the exhibitions where the work was exhibited.

Henry Moore has influenced the history of twentieth - century sculpture more decisively than anyone else. He was one of the first contemporary sculptors to realise his ideas in the public space throughout the world. His oeuvre was a lasting source of inspiration for an entire generation of artists - from Hans Arp, Alberto Giacometti and Pablo Picasso to the younger generation of German sculptors. Henry Moore (1898 - 1 986), known as the "Picasso of Sculpture", is regarded as one of the most important sculptors of the twentieth century and the epitome of the modern artist. Typical of his work is the interrelationship between nature and abstraction. He discovered the "voi ds", so - called openings and holes which heighten the sculptural, three - dimensional effect of his works. With this new approach Moore exercised a strong influence on younger sculptors, who gained decisive impulses from his sculptures. This volume presents M oore as the dominant personality of modern sculpture in collaboration with the members of the younger generation of artists.

For three months Biel, Switzerland, hosted a special kind of sculpture. It was special not simply because it was by one of Switzerland's most famous contemporary artists-Thomas Hirschhorn-and dedicated to one of the most prominent authors in the history of Swiss literature, Robert Walser. Beyond that, this sculpture was a redefinition of sculpture itself, because what takes on a plastic form here is not made of stone, steel, or bronze. It is society itself that helped to develop this work of art. In 2016 Thomas Hirschhorn and the curator Kathleen Buhler began doing field research in Biel, the city of Robert Walser's birth, connecting with residents, clubs, artists, literati, and experts. This resulted in a multifaceted agenda. Every day the two offered events such as readings, walking tours, lectures, and children's activities. All of this ultimately comprised the Robert Walser-Sculpture. Never before has an entire city been integrated into a temporary work of art in this way.

This survey brings together three decades of work by contemporary Native American artistGerald Clarke (Cahuilla). Utilizing wit and humor to expose historical and present-day injustice, Clarke brings a decolonial perspective to urgent cultural and political issues facing our world. Gerald Clarke is an artist, university professor, Cahuillatribal leader, cowboy, and Indian (the artist's preferred identity). Combining various media in his sculptures, paintings, works on paper, videos, performances, and installations, Clarke derives artistic inspiration from his cultural heritage, expressing traditional ideas in contemporary forms that are both poetic and politically urgent. Clarke's artistic output resonates with histories of assemblage, pop, and conceptual art produced by both Native and non-native artists. This amply illustrated catalogue introduces Clarke's work at a moment when it is profoundly necessary.

This book comprehensively examines the relationship between literature and sculpture in the work of W. B. Yeats, drawing on extensive archival research to offer revelatory new readings of the poet. The book traces Yeats's literary and critical engagement with Celtic Revival statuary, public monuments in Dublin, the coin designs of the Irish Free State, abstract sculpture by the Vorticists and modernists, and a variety of carvings, decorative sculptures, and objets d'art. By charting Yeats's early art school education in Dublin, his attempts to raise funds for public monuments in the city, and to secure commissions for his favourite sculptors, the book documents a lifelong interest in the plastic arts. New and original readings of Yeats's poetry, drama, and prose criticism emerge from this concertedly inter-arts and interdisciplinary study.