Emilio Vedova's artistic career began in Venice in the mid-1930s. He immediately felt the deep allure of grand Venetian painting and sculpture and, guided by the restless agitation and dynamic mobility of the baroque, was soon plunged into total and extreme three-dimensional involvement. The work in "Emilio Vedova Scultore" originates precisely from his feeling of being a living and breathing part of the beloved spaces he encountered along his way, inexhaustible sources of stimuli and incitement, which he transformed into volumetric works of sculpture, architecture, opera and theatre. In his 1958 exhibition in Warsaw, the geometrical work mounted on the ceiling of the Zachenta Palace confirms Vedova's interest in sculpture and his penchant for articulating spatial implications.
This is followed in 1959 in Venice by the L-shaped teleri in the painting/ambient of Palazzo Grassi and then by his opera Intolleranza '60 (Intolerance '60) at the Teatro La Fenice, in collaboration with Luigi Nono. With the Plurimi (1961-1965), foreshadowed by the Rilievi (Reliefs, 1960-1964), Vedova removes the painting from the wall and installs it in the space of a fragmented, intersected set of surfaces somewhere between painting, sculpture and architecture. In Berlin he creates the Plurimi of the Absurdes Berliner Tagebuch '64, which found their natural development a few years later in Spazio/Plurimo/Luce (Space/Plurimo/Light), executed for Expo 1967 in Montreal. In this work, fourteen glass slides produced by the artist on Murano are projected simultaneously up to a height of 16 metres in the asymmetrical space by an equal number of large-format projectors. In 1977-1978, he works on the Plurimi/Binari from his Lacerazione (Laceration) cycle, where sliding, superimposed surfaces and black and white paintings squeezed into massive steel frames create images in continual transformation. In the same period he also dedicates himself to the Frammenti/Schegge (Fragments/Splinters) cycle - precarious, solitary and asymmetrical presences - and to the ... Cosiddetti Carnevali... (... So-called Carnivals...). Lastly, in the 1980s Vedova began his large installations of the Dischi (Discs) and Tondi - refound, vital and aggressive repossessions of space.
This book addresses the artist's entire career as a sculptor and includes a study of his series of models - his way of taking notes in three dimensions - which mark out his tireless daily quest for expression of the total work, towards which Emilio Vedova was inexorably drawn.

With more than 100 works representing four decades, this is the definitive monograph on abstract sculptor Mel Kendrick, who first emerged in 1970s New York, where he studied with legends Tony Smith and Robert Morris. At a time when Minimal and Conceptual art dominated, Kendrick forged his own path, embarking on a career-long series of provocative investigations into the fundamentals and possibilities of sculpture, his restless experimentations with form, scale, and materiality realized in wood, rubber, cast paper, or concrete. Essays by Nancy Princenthal, Allison N. Kemmerer, Terrie Sultan, and Adam D. Weinberg, and a conversation between Kendrick and fellow artist Carroll Dunham provide fascinating perspective on forty years of art making in the aftermath of Minimalism.

The work of the prize winning Peruvian American light artist Grimanesa Amoros is characterised by organic forms and an instinctive approach. The basis of her fascinating sculptures lies, however, in the natural sciences, social history and critical theory. Research and feeling establish a form of communication in her works. The expansive sculptures and video installations of Grimanesa Amoros have already been shown all over the world: from Mexico to Tel Aviv and from Beijing to Times Square in New York. She presented her latest works, "OCUPANTE" and "GOLDEN SECRET ROOM", In the Ludwig Museum Koblenz. The artist creat es playful light installations which are so enigmatic that they permit interpretations on different levels. Together with an overview of her work, this volume reproduces the works in large format illustrations, thereby reproducing their fluidity and luminosity.

By foregrounding the overlaps between sculpture and the decorative, this volume of essays offers a model for a more integrated form of art history writing. Through distinct case studies, from a seventeenth-century Danish altarpiece to contemporary British ceramics, it brings to centre stage makers, objects, concepts and spaces that have been marginalized by the enforcement of boundaries within art and design discourse. These essays challenge the classed, raced and gendered categories that have structured the histories and languages of art and its making. Sculpture and the Decorative in Britain and Europe is essential reading for anyone interested in the history and practice of sculpture and the decorative arts and the methodologies of art history.

Luigi Valadier, son of the French-born Andrea, obtained his silversmith license in 1760 and became one of the most celebrated artists in Europe, working for the noble families of Rome (Borghese, Odescalchi, Chigi, Orsini), cardinals and popes and a broad international clientele which included the Duke of Northumberland, Madame du Barry, the Bali of Malta, Jacques-Laure Le Tonnelier de Breteuil, the King of Sweden, Karl Theodor, Elector of Bavaria, the Count of the North, heir to the Russian throne, etc. His workshop situated near Piazza di Spagna employed dozens of craftsmen and produced not only silverware but also bronze statues, often copies of ancient sculptures, magnificent clocks, vases in precious marbles, lamps, huge candelabras, furniture, desers, reliquaries and liturgical vessels, and much more. In 1785 while completing commissions for the Borghese prince and working on the cast of the enormous bell of St Peter's, he committed suicide by drowning in the Tiber river, possibly due to the severe economic challenges from which his extraordinary workshop was suffering.

In archaic and classical Greece, statues played a constant role in people's religious, political, economic, aesthetic, and mental lives. Evidence of many kinds demonstrates that ancient Greeks thought about--and interacted with--statues in ways very different from our own. This book recovers ancient thinking about statues by approaching them through contemporary literary sources. It not only shows that ancient viewers conceived of images as more operative than aesthetic, but additionally reveals how poets and philosophers found in sculpture a practice ''good to think with.''

Deborah Tarn Steiner considers how Greek authors used images to ponder the relation of a copy to an original and of external appearance to inner reality. For these writers, a sculpture could straddle life and death, encode desire, or occasion reflection on their own act of producing a text. Many of the same sources also reveal how thinking about statues was reflected in the objects' everyday treatment. Viewing representations of gods and heroes as vessels hosting a living force, worshippers ritually washed, clothed, and fed them in order to elicit the numinous presence within.

By reading the plastic and verbal sources together, this book offers new insights into classical texts while illuminating the practices surrounding the design, manufacture, and deployment of ancient images. Its argument that images are properly objects of cultural and social--rather than purely aesthetic--study will attract art historians, cultural historians, and anthropologists, as well as classicists.

This pioneering book, the first monograph devoted to Donald Judd, addresses the whole breadth of Judd's practices. Drawing on documents found in nearly twenty archives, David Raskin explains why some of Judd's works of art seem startlingly ephemeral while others remain insistently physical. In the process of answering this previously perplexing question, Raskin traces Judd's principles from his beginnings as an art critic through his fabulous installations and designs in Marfa, Texas. He discusses Judd's early important paintings and idiosyncratic red objects, as well as the three-dimensional works that are celebrated throughout the world. He also examines Judd's commitment to empirical values and his political activism, and concludes by considering the importance of Judd's example for recent art. Ultimately, Raskin develops a picture of Judd as never before seen: he shows us an artist who asserted his individuality with spare designs; who found spiritual values in plywood, Plexiglas, and industrial production; who refused to distinguish between thinking and feeling while asserting that science marked the limits of knowledge; who claimed that his art provided intuitions of morality but not a specific set of tenets; and who worked for political causes that were neither left nor right.

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

The recently deceased French-American sculptor Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010) was one of the most important artists of the last century. Her fleshy blobs, skeletal spiders and the aggressive fragility of her work offered a new solution to the antagonism between the figurative and the abstract that had previously been part and parcel of modernism. Bourgeois herself provided a unique interpretive level to modern art through the uses she made of childhood trauma, family life and sexuality. This accessible study serves as both an ideal introduction to the central themes of the late artist's oeuvre and as a commemoration of her one-hundredth birthday. Over the course of nine chapters, it examines her life, her exploration of the works of other artists and the transformation of her emotions into such works of art as the now iconic pieces "Destruction of the Father," "Fillette," "Cells" and "Maman."

A mountain of chairs piled between buildings. Shoes sewn behind animal membranes into a wall. A massive crack running through the floor of Tate Modern. Powerful works like these by sculptor Doris Salcedo evoke the significance of bearing witness and processes of collective healing. Salcedo, who lives and works in Bogota, roots her art in Colombia's social and political landscape - including its long history of civil wars - with an elegance and poetic sensibility that balances the gravitas of her subjects. Her work is undergirded by intense fieldwork, including interviews with people who have suffered loss and endured trauma from political violence. In recent years, Salcedo has become increasingly interested in the universality of these experiences and expanded her research to Turkey, Italy, Great Britain, and the United States. Published to accompany Salcedo's first retrospective exhibition and the American debut of her major work Plegaria muda, Doris Salcedo is the most comprehensive survey of her sculptures and installations to date. In addition to featuring new contributions by respected scholars and curators, the book includes over one hundred color illustrations highlighting many pieces from Salcedo's twenty-five-year career. Offering fresh perspectives on a vital body of work, Doris Salcedo is a testament to the power of one of today's most important international artists.

The astonishing fame enjoyed by Manneken-Pis is inversely proportional to his size. However, as surprising as this may seem, his story is still largely unknown. During which period did the statue first appear? When did he receive his first costumes? When was he first used to symbolise that mischievous and irreverent spirit that the inhabitants of Brussels have claimed for themselves? In a more general sense, when did he first embody the city's image abroad? This book invites you to discover the many facets of the Manneken-Pis phenomenon. Text in English, French and Dutch.

Austrian artist Manfred Wakolbinger, born 1952, trained as a metal worker and tool maker before turning to art. Following first steps in jewellery design, he moved on to sculpture and photography, later also to video art. Many of his sometimes voluminous sculptures were created for public spaces. The submarine world has captured his particular interest in photography and video. Wakolbinger's art is organic and conveys an inner poetry, yet it remains enigmatic even when it becomes concrete and figurative. This book features a selection Wakolbinger's works in photography and sculpture since 2012, accompanied by a conversation between the artist and curator Jasper Sharp. An essay on the topic of language in his art by scholar and critic Cornelia Offergeld and a text by celebrated Austrian novelist Christoph Ransmayr describe and interpret the recent oeuvre by one of Austria's most distinguished contemporary artists. Text in English and German.

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.

Alexandru Radvan's (*1977) new monograph Mythical Flesh presents his varied practice and gathers paintings, collages, temperas, sculptures, and installations of the past five years. In this series of works, all named after fundamental myths, mythical and mythological characters appear, taking the shape of ancient goddesses, titans, centaurs, hunters, or explorers. For Radvan, the reference to these myths of humanity equals an analysis of the present and forms the foundation of his work. This rich survey publication is completed by essays on Radvan's artistic development by Diana Dochia and Mark Gisbourne. Text in English and German.

Bonalumi has overcome the two-dimensionality of painting through the technique of 'extroflexion', which transformed the canvas into a sculpture. The volume accompanies the first great anthological exhibition dedicated to Agostino Bonalumi (1935-2013) in the city of Milan, a few years after his death. From the beginnings with Enrico Castellani and Piero Manzoni, through the sixties in contact with major European groups until the recent international rediscovery, the volume documents the multi-faceted and at the same time rigorous activity of one of the greatest interpreters of abstractionism in the world, who managed to overcome the two-dimensionality of painting through works on canvas that are transformed into sculpture, thanks to the technique of 'extroflexion'. The volume, with texts by Marco Meneguzzo and Philip Rylands, is complete with an anthology of writings about the artist and bio-bibliographical sections.

The collection of pre-Columbian Peruvian textiles in the Danish National Museum consists of around 500 items, which were all found in graves. The textiles are mainly garments that were used for wrapping around the mummies. The mummies were buried in subterranean burial chambers in the sandy desert on the central and southern coast of Peru, from where they were excavated around AD 1900. The burials originate from about 500 BC to AD 1550 and are dated by their style, material, and technology. The pre-Columbian Peruvians mastered all the textile technologies which were known in Europe before the industrialisation -- and even a few more (eg: discontinuous warp, double wrap and possibly some of the supplementary warp and weft techniques). Most of these techniques are represented in this collection.

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. For years, he has seen his love of art as a vocation -- one which he nurtures parallel to his work in construction. 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 contribution to the European Embankment project in St Petersburg, Krier recently demonstrated the power of architecture and fine art to cross-fertilise. The architects in charge of the urban development of this district are Sergei Tchoban and Evgeny Gerasimov. Krier designed the facade for a 132-metres long building on the Newa riverbank one that looks across the water onto the rear facade of the Hermitage. The vibrancy of the architecture is enhanced by its sculptural ornamentation based on the Balzac theme, 'The Human Comedy'. In this regard, Krier modelled over 50 figures in white clay, as well as around 65 linear metres of reliefs. The short poems that comment on the sculptures also centre on the theme of mankind and its interrelationships in society.

The techniques used to forge iron and precious metal are a key theme in the work of Viennese artist Gabriele Kutschera (b. 1950). Starting out with jewellery creations related to the body, she turned to spatially related, forged iron sculptures from the 1990s. The rhythmical process of altering the cross-section of an industrially prefabricated iron rod is a defining factor of her metalsmithing: by hammering and annealing - the creation and release of the metal's stresses - she is able to shape the material. Kutschera translates this sequential processing into her expressive works. The perception of time and change is her chief motif, which she also addresses in her paper works Timelines. Gabriele Kutschera documents the distinguished Austrian artist's works in iron sculpture, jewellery and paper from 2000 to 2018. Text in English and German.