The first book to put the sacred and sensuous bronze statues from India's Chola dynasty in social context From the ninth through the thirteenth century, the Chola dynasty of southern India produced thousands of statues of Hindu deities, whose physical perfection was meant to reflect spiritual beauty and divine transcendence. During festivals, these bronze sculptures-including Shiva, referred to in a saintly vision as "the thief who stole my heart"-were adorned with jewels and flowers and paraded through towns as active participants in Chola worship. In this richly illustrated book, leading art historian Vidya Dehejia introduces the bronzes within the full context of Chola history, culture, and religion. In doing so, she brings the bronzes and Chola society to life before our very eyes. Dehejia presents the bronzes as material objects that interacted in meaningful ways with the people and practices of their era. Describing the role of the statues in everyday activities, she reveals not only the importance of the bronzes for the empire, but also little-known facets of Chola life. She considers the source of the copper and jewels used for the deities, proposing that the need for such resources may have influenced the Chola empire's political engagement with Sri Lanka. She also investigates the role of women patrons in bronze commissions and discusses the vast public records, many appearing here in translation for the first time, inscribed on temple walls. From the Cholas' religious customs to their agriculture, politics, and even food, The Thief Who Stole My Heart offers an expansive and complete immersion in a community still accessible to us through its exquisite sacred art. Published in association with the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

This comprehensive sourcebook is destined to become a lasting and definitive resource on the art and aesthetic philosophy of the American artist David Smith (1906-1965). A pioneer of twentieth-century modernism, Smith was renowned for the expansive formal and conceptual ambitions of his broadly diverse and inventive welded-steel abstractions. His groundbreaking achievements drew freely on cubism, surrealism, and constructivism, profoundly influencing later movements such as minimalism and environmental art. By radically challenging older conventions of monolithic figuration and refuting arbitrary distinctions between painters and sculptors, Smith asserted sculpture's equal role in advancing modern art. A compilation of Smith's poems, sketchbook notes, essays, lectures, letters to the editor, reviews, and interviews, these previously unpublished texts underscore the varied ways in which his writing functioned as a means to examine and articulate his private identity and to promote the social ideals that made him a key participant in contemporary discourses surrounding modernism, art and politics, and sculptural aesthetics. All the documents in David Smith: Collected Writings, Lectures, and Interviews have been newly corrected against the original manuscripts, typescripts, and audiotapes. Each text in this collection is annotated with historical and contextual information that reflects Smith's own process of continually reviewing and revising his writings in response to his evolving aspirations as a visual artist.

An in-depth exploration of how the iconic artist created his works over the course of his full career Among the most celebrated figures of modern art, Amedeo Modigliani (1884-1920) has been the subject of many exhibitions and publications, but none until now has examined in depth how the artist created his paintings and sculptures. Drawing on research using the latest scientific techniques, the authors explore the artist's reuse of materials in his early years; his pivot from artistic trends such as Cubism to engage with a stylized form of figuration; the timeline of his evocative sculptures; and the evolution of his approach from heavily worked canvases to more ethereal paintings. The richly illustrated book also looks at the role of Albert C. Barnes, an early collector of Modigliani's work, in shaping the Italian artist's critical reception in the United States. The Barnes Foundation today owns one of the most important groups of Modigliani works in the world. These, together with some forty other paintings and sculptures from public and private collections worldwide, are interpreted through the lens of new studies carried out by leading international museums. Distributed for the Barnes Foundation Exhibition Schedule: The Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia (October 16, 2022-January 29, 2023)

The Stephen K. and Janie Woo Scher Collection of portrait medals is unparalleled among those in private hands. Noted for its comprehensiveness and outstanding quality, it includes medals dating from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries. This new volume, the result of a the Schers' gift of 450 medals to The Frick Collection in 2016, brings to life these masterpieces of small-scale sculpture, conveying the circumstances of their creation and their historic significance. Beginning in the Italian Renaissance, medals were made to commemorate individuals and to acknowledge specific events or milestones, such as marriages, deaths, coronations, and military victories. They were precious, portable, and popular among the wealthy and powerful. This book provides a concise, fascinating introduction to their artistry.

How many women sculptors can you name? This book will help you to understand the work and lives of dozens of women sculptors - significant artists from the past as well as those working in the exciting world of sculpture today. Camille Claudel Barbara Hepworth Elisabeth Frink Niki de Saint Phalle Louise Bourgeois Ruth Asawa Rachel Whiteread Malvina Hoffman Maggi Hambling Cornelia Parker Senga Ningudi Sophie Ryder and many more... With an overview of women making sculpture from the 1800s to today, we explore the work of fifty extraordinary women artists who have forged a name for themselves in a male arena, broken rules, pushed boundaries and inspired us with their visionary creations.

Zygotes and Confessions is a publication devoted to the work of London-based artist Nick Hornby, and has been produced to accompany his first solo exhibition in a public gallery. The exhibition, which shares its title with the publication, is presented at MOSTYN, Wales, UK, from November 2020 to April 2021. Hornby is known for his monumental site-specific works that combine digital software with traditional materials such as bronze, steel, granite and marble. In this publication he presents a substantial new body of smaller, more intimate work comprising three discrete yet interrelated series of works inspired by the history of sculptural busts, modernist abstractions and mantelpiece ceramic dogs. United by glossy photographic surfaces created by means of an industrial process in which his marble and resin composite sculptures are dipped into liquid photographs, these new works explore themes of portraiture, the body, identity, sexuality and intimacy in the digital era. A number of the works have been made in collaboration with fashion photographer Louie Banks. Along with a foreword by Helen Boyd, Head of Marketing and Publisher Relations at the Casemate Group, the publication features a text by MOSTYN director Alfredo Cramerotti and an essay by London-based publisher, editor and writer Matt Price. Price writes: "With one eye on the sculpture of the past and the other on that of tomorrow, technology is at the heart of London-based Nick Hornby's practice and is central to the production of his often imposing, mind-bending and futuristic-looking sculptures. Using materials such as bronze and marble, his work points back towards the Renaissance or the nineteenth century, yet his use of resin and digital technology positions him very much in the present, exploring languages both figurative and abstract, often simultaneously." The texts are presented in both English and Welsh. Newly commissioned studio photography of the works by Ben Westoby, along with installation views of the exhibition commissioned by MOSTYN from Mark Blower, illustrate the publication, which has been designed by Joe Gilmore / Qubik. The publication is co-published by MOSTYN, Wales, UK, and Anomie Publishing, London, and distributed internationally by Casemate Art, a division of the Casemate Group. Nick Hornby (b.1980) is a British artist living and working in London. Hornby studied at the Slade School of Art and Chelsea College of Art. His work has been exhibited at Tate Britain, Southbank Centre London, Leighton House London, CASS Sculpture Foundation, Glyndebourne, Fitzwilliam Museum Cambridge, Museum of Arts and Design New York, and Poznan Biennale, Poland. Residencies include Outset (Israel) and Eyebeam (USA), and awards include the UAL Sculpture Prize. His work has been reviewed in the New York Times, frieze, Artforum, The Art Newspaper, The FT, and featured in Architectural Digest and Sculpture Magazine.

Originally published in 1909, this book contains a guide in English and French to the sculptures of Chartres Cathedral. The text is illustrated with over one hundred photographic plates of the sculptures, with an explanation for each in both languages on the facing page. Some of the photographs included are among the earliest published examples of telephotography. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in French medieval sculpture, the cathedral at Chartres or the history of photography.

Jacobo Castellano, (Jaen, 1976), is one of the most complex and solid contemporary Spanish artists. He uses engraving to create a body of work based on the emotions and sensations that are hidden in his personal memory. In his work he uses elements such as curtains, wire, small piggy banks, coffins or those rhombuses that were placed on the top of the TV screen. These elements are superimposed creating structures that seem to be on the verge of collapse and that seem to want to hide something or point to a place to hide and protect themselves from imminent collapse. The work of Jacobo Castellano follows a defined line in which the recovery of remembrances stored in his memory leads to a deep reflection on essential issues such as identity, or life and death. Numerous collections of contemporary art have their production, like ARTIUM. Basque Center-Museum of Contemporary Art; CAAC. Andalusian Center for Contemporary Art; CGAC. Galician Center of Contemporary Art; Montenmedio Contemporary Art Foundation; or the Rafael Boti Provincial Plastic Arts Foundation, among others. Contents: Rincones polvorientos de la vida / Life's Dusty Corners, by Javier Hontoria El juego sin fin (notas de un coleccionista / The Endless Game (Notes of a Collector) by Luis Caballero Martinez Conversation with Joao Mourao and Luis Silva Text in English and Spanish.

Arman was a US-naturalised French painter. This book covers the first twenty years of Arman's artistic production, from the Accumulations of industrial objects and series products to the Poubelles, documenting consumer society's waste; from the famous Coleres, Coupes and Combustions, which through different processes dematerialise objects depriving them of their functionality, to paintings, to actions and monumental works adhering to the 'poetic of things'.

"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.

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.

Screening Statues: Sculpture and Cinema is the first book to focus on the relationship between sculpture and the silver screen. It covers a broad range of magical, mystical and phenomenological interactions between the two media, from early film's eroticized tableaux vivants to enigmatic sculptures in modernist cinema. Sculptures are literally brought to life on the silver screen, while living people are turned into, or trapped inside, statuary. The book examines key sculptural motifs and cinematic sculpture in film history through a series of case studies and through an extensive reference gallery of 150 different films. Considering the work of directors like Georges Melies, Jean Cocteau and Alain Resnais, as well as films like House of Wax, Jason and the Argonauts and Clash of the Titans, this is an innovative exploration of two different media, their artistic traditions and their respective theoretical paradigms.

A nucleus of sculptures cast by Andrea di Alessandri, commonly called from his native city, 'Il Bresciano', or from his products, 'Andrea dai bronzi', has been identified over the centuries. His style has been described as having similarities both with the High Renaissance of Sansovino and the Mannerism of Vittoria, the two successive master sculptors of sixteenth-century Venice, though he cast major bronzes for both. Andrea's signed masterpiece is a Paschal Candlestick in bronze, over two metres high and with sixty or more fascinating figures, made for Sansovino's magnificent lost church of Santo Spirito in 1568 and now in Santa Maria della Salute. The author's identification in 1996 of a pair of magnificent Firedogs with sphinx feet (which in 1568 had been recommended to Prince Francesco de'Medici in Florence), and in 2015 of an elaborate figurative bronze Ewer in Verona, have been the culmination of the process of recognition. Archival research has at last revealed the span of Andrea's life as 1524/25-1573, as well as many significant facts about his family and patronage. So the time is ripe for a comprehensive, well-illustrated, book on Il Bresciano, a 'new' and major bronzista in the great tradition of north Italy.

Rodin & Dance: The Essence of Movement is the first serious study of Rodin's late sculptural series known as the Dance Movements. Exploring the artist's fascination with dance and bodies in extreme acrobatic poses, the exhibition and accompanying catalogue give an account of Rodin's passion for new forms of dance - from south-asian dances to the music hall and the avant garde - which began appearing on the French stage around 1900. Rodin made hundreds of drawings and watercolours of dancers. From about 1911 he also gave sculptural expression to this fascination with dancers' bodies and movements in creating the Dance Movements, a series of small clay figure studies (each approx. 30 cm in height) that stretch and twist in unsettling ways. These leaping, turning figures in terracotta and plaster were found in the artist's studio after his death and were not exhibited during Rodin's lifetime or known beyond his close circle. Presented alongside the associated drawings and photographs of some of the dancers, they show a new side to Rodin's art, in which he pushed the boundaries of sculpture, expressing themes of flight and gravity. This exhibition catalogue aims to become the authoritative reference for Rodin's Dance Movements, comprising essays from leading scholars in the field of sculpture. It includes an introductory essay on the history of the bronze casting of the Dance Movements and the critical fortune of the series, an essay on the dancers Rodin admired, and an extensive technical essay. The Catalogue will comprise detailed entries on the works in the exhibition and new technical information on the drawings. Contributors include Alexandra Gerstein, Curator of Sculpture and Decorative Arts, The Courtauld Institute of Art; Antoinette Le Normand-Romain, Director, Institut National d'Histoire de l'Art, Paris; Juliet Bellow, Associate Professor of Art History, American University in Washington, DC and currently Resident Fellow, the Center for Ballet and the Arts, New York University; Francois Blanchetiere, Curator of Sculpture at the Musee Rodin; Agnes Cascio and Juliette Levy, distinguished sculpture conservators; Sophie Biass-Fabiani, Curator of Works on Paper at the Musee Rodin; and Kate Edmonson, Conservator of Works on Paper at The Courtauld Gallery.

This first monograph on Phillip Lai (b.1969, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia) charts the artist's sculptural development over the course of the last two decades. From a basement soy-sauce factory to the Hepworth Prize for Sculpture, the publication surveys several of the artist's exhibitions across London, Wakefield, Turin, Berlin and Hong Kong. The nine chapters explore an evolving oeuvre that finds form in materials like aluminium, pewter, concrete, resin, rice, cooking pots, textiles and film. It is through these technologies that Lai broaches the material limits of the everyday world, often working with casting processes that see the abstraction and changing stability of materials as they transition from fluid to solid. What comes into focus is a fascination with how objects can relieve or modulate primal human urges to food and water and how, by extension, a material world might be re-envisioned around concerns of depletion and survival. This publication includes an essay by critic and writer Jan Verwoert, with bilingual text in English and Chinese throughout.

Patricia Wengraf is one of the world's leading dealers in bronzes, sculpture and works of art. In her particular speciality, bronzes of the 15th-18th centuries, her knowledge and connoisseurship are of world repute. This exquisite catalogue - the first sales catalogue ever published by the dealer - presents a selection of exceptional works. Accompanies an exhibition in New York City.

"With this new edition of Ice Carving Made Easy, Second Edition, Joe Amendola shares with all present and future ice carvers the resurgence of this historic art form. This book will guide and inspire thousands of chefs and artists to enjoy the artistic fulfillment, professionalism, and camaraderie of the exciting art of ice carving." —Larry Malchick, President, National Ice Carving Association "The information on the history, tools and accessories, different methods, types of ice blocks, and the safety and precautionary measures in ice carving will be of tremendous help to many young enthusiasts in their goal to become professional ice sculptors." —Hiroshi Noguchi, C.E.C., A.A.C., Executive Chef, Stouffer Orlando Resort Here is the first new American ice carving manual to be released in ten years! Written by a culinary master, Joe Amendola, it addresses current developments in the field of ice carving. It emphasizes American and European subjects and designs in an attempt to offset the exclusivity of oriental designs in available Japanese books. The organization of Ice Carving Made Easy, Second Edition allows for carvers of every proficiency to use the book with success—each stage of creating a carving is discussed, from manufacturing of ice to the final presentation. Such introductory topics as the handling of ice, hand and power tools, and templates are described in as much detail and given as much attention as the more complex sections about carving faces, fusing, and developing multiple block sculptures. Each of the 34 ice sculptures that Amendola presents is supported by step-by-step instructions that allow the novice and expert alike to create show-pieces that will add a special touch to banquets, buffets, and special events.

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.