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Books > Arts & Architecture > Art forms, treatments & subjects > Sculpture & other three-dimensional art forms > Sculpture
This brilliant book focuses on the aesthetic concerns of the two
most important sculptors of the early 19th century, the great
Italian sculptor Antonio Canova (1757-1822) and his illustrious
Danish rival Bertel Thorvaldsen (1770-1844). Rather than comparing
their artistic output, the distinguished art historian David
Bindman addresses the possible impact of Kantian aesthetics on
their work. Both artists had elevated reputations, and their
sculptures attracted interest from philosophically minded critics.
Despite the sculptors' own apparent disdain for theory, Bindman
argues that they were in dialogue with and greatly influenced by
philosophical and critical debates, and made many decisions in
creating their sculptures specifically in response to those
debates. Warm Flesh, Cold Marble considers such intriguing topics
as the aesthetic autonomy of works of art, the gender of the
subject, the efficacy of marble as an imitative medium, the
question of color and texture in relation to ideas and practices of
antiquity, and the relationship between the whiteness of marble and
ideas of race.
Exploring the complex interweaving of race, national identity, and
the practice of sculpture, Amy Lyford takes us through a close
examination of the early US career of the Japanese American
sculptor Isamu Noguchi (1904-1988). The years between 1930 and 1950
were perhaps some of the most fertile of Noguchi's career. Yet the
work that he produced during this time has received little
sustained attention. Weaving together new archival material,
little-known or unrealized works, and those that are familiar,
Lyford offers a fresh perspective on the significance of Noguchi's
modernist sculpture to twentieth-century culture and art history.
Through an examination of his work, this book tells a story about
his relation to the most important cultural and political issues of
his time. By focusing on Noguchi's reputation, and reception as an
artist of Japanese American descent, Lyford analyzes the artist and
his work within the context of a burgeoning desire at that time to
define what modern American art might be--and confront unspoken
assumptions that linked whiteness to Americanness. Lyford reveals
how that reputation was both shaped by and helped define ideas
about race, labor and national identity in twentieth-century
American culture.
The books will showcase the best paintings and sculptures of the
period and present rarely seen gems from provincial museums and
museums of former Soviet republics. Each book opens with an expert
article on the subject. Images are organised in chronological
order, displaying a wide variety of artistic styles from
Impressionism and Post-Impressionism to Socialist Realism, Severe
Style and Neorealism.
The activities of Rogier van der Weyden (1399/1400-1464) were much
wider in scope than the well-known painted oeuvre that has been the
subject of so many publications. This book, with its focus on stone
sculpture in Brussels at the time that Rogier was established
there, an area of art history that to date has been little
explored, offers a fresh and fascinating look at the context in
which Brussels's famous city painter operated. Bart Fransen leads
you through a network of stoneworkers and craftsmen, from the stone
quarry to the sculptor's workshop, to discover a number of
remarkable but unknown or misjudged sculptures now in churches, an
abbey, a beguinage, a museum's reserve collection and a castle
chapel. With the various case studies in mind he goes on to examine
Rogier van der Weyden's direct involvement in sculptural projects,
turning to the evidence revealed by archival documents, drawings
and sculpture itself. The result is a highly readable and
plentifully illustrated book that re-establishes the close
relationship between the various art forms that existed in the
fifteenth century.
Explores how artists from the European Renaissance to the global
present have used sculpture and color to evoke the presence of the
living body Since the earliest myths of the sculptor Pygmalion
bringing a statue to life through desire, artists have explored the
boundaries between sculpture and the physical materiality of the
body. This groundbreaking volume examines key sculptural works from
13th-century Europe to the global present, revealing new insights
into the strategies artists deploy to blur the distinction between
art and life. Sculpture, which has historically taken the human
figure as its subject, is presented here in myriad manifestations
created by artists ranging from Donatello and Degas to Picasso,
Kiki Smith, and Jeff Koons. Featuring works created in traditional
media such as wood and marble as well as the unexpected such as
wax, metal, and blood, Like Life presents sculpture both
conventional and shocking, including effigies, dolls, mannequins,
automata, waxworks, and anatomical models. Containing texts by art
and cultural historians as well as interviews with contemporary
artists, this is a provocative exploration of three-dimensional
representations of the human body.
Chihuly at Kew: Reflections on nature is a celebration of the work
of iconic artist Dale Chihuly, who once again is exhibiting his
luminous artworks in Kew's spectacular landscape, featuring pieces
never seen before in the UK. The book showcases these utterly
unique artworks across one of London's most spectacular landscapes,
in a perfect marriage of art, science, and nature. Stunning
photography depicts the dazzling art installations situated across
the Gardens, set within the landscape as well as in glasshouses and
in the Shirley Sherwood Gallery of Botanical Art. Highlights
include the Drawings and Rotolo series, some of the most
technically challenging work that Chihuly has ever created, as well
as Seaforms, undulating forms that conjure underwater life. A
specially designed sculpture suspended from the ceiling of the
newly restored Temperate House provides one of the moss stunning
features of the exhibition and book. An introductory essay by Tim
Richardson accompanies the artworks, along with artist's chronology
and biography.
Xu Bin Jueyi's sculpture breaks nearly a hundred years of stasis in
Buddha sculpting. Using contemporary materials such as metal, resin
and wood, Jueyi literally reshapes the aesthetic for Buddha imagery
while retaining the compassion and tranquillity that lies behind
it. Through the study and sketching of Chinese and Tibetan natural
scenery and folk customs, the artist has gained an in depth
understanding of the supreme place of spirituality in Buddhist
followers' lives. The purity and serenity of their quest, and Xu
Bin's own quest, are shown in the sculptor's creative energy which
inspire their quests for peace and serenity. The resulting Buddha
sculptures bring together contemporary and traditional images and
ideas. Simple and clear, they display a minimalism in keeping with
the Buddha's life example, while inviting the viewer to delve
deeper into the Buddha's expansive teachings.
Kulango Figurines is designed to introduce various miniature works
created by the Kulango in northeastern Cote d'Ivoire, who were
formerly vassals of the two kingdoms that inhabited the country
(Bouna and Gyaman). Their extraordinarily varied art, which can be
both intriguing and disconcerting, is relatively unknown. Their
metal sculptures in particular display a strikingly free
expressiveness, breaking as they do with the iconographic codes
that govern their works in wood. Doing away with immobile
remoteness, bodies seem to reinvent movement, sometimes adopting
almost choreographic gestures, an airy grace, sinuous lines. Or, in
trembling tension, some display unexpected twists and provocative
curves, while others stretch out impossibly or offer a chance for
virtuoso foreshortening and stylised bodies. Still others are even
stranger, like Siamese twins, inseparable triplets, headless
figures or figures with one head on two torsos, with one leg or
four, webbed feet, outsize arms and hooped bodies. Who are these
enigmatic beings whose bulging eyes peer at the invisible? Is the
sculpture confined to just these specimens? The range of styles is
simply astonishing, the forms beyond imagination. The collection
includes over 100 figurines, none of which is over 10cm tall:
pendants, amulets, fortune tellers' statuettes or weights for gold.
Introduced into our world through the metamorphosis of photography,
transfigured by lighting and framing effects, these resurrected
works have been revitalised, like apparitions from another world.
Text in English and French.
South African sculptor Angus Taylor, born in Johannesburg in 1970
and alumnus of the University of Pretoria, is known mainly for his
monumental works. For these, in addition to the classic bronze, he
uses a selection of materials special to his immediate environment:
black granite, red jasper, straw, and the red earth of the Pretoria
region. In the symbiosis of these materials with traditional
artistic craft techniques, distinctly contemporary works arise,
which Taylor pioneeringly positions as figurative landmark
sculpture. This first-ever monograph on Angus Taylor offers a
comprehensive survey of his oeuvre to date. Key works from his
entire career since the founding of his studio Dionysus Sculpture
Works in 1997 are featured in full colour illustrations throughout.
The essays discuss Taylor's methods, practices, and personal
philosophies and put his work is context within South Africa's
social situation as well as with his own biography. The book offers
a much welcomed profound introduction to Angus Taylor's innovative
and characteristic body of work.
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Rodney Mcmillian
(Hardcover)
Rodney McMillian; Edited by Anthony Elms, Naima Keith; Contributions by Charles Gaines, Rita Gonzalez
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R1,226
R891
Discovery Miles 8 910
Save R335 (27%)
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Out of stock
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King George III will not stay on the ground. Ever since a crowd in
New York City toppled his equestrian statue in 1776, burying some
of the parts and melting the rest into bullets, the king has been
riding back into American culture, raising his gilded head in
visual representations and reappearing as fragments. In this book,
Wendy Bellion asks why Americans destroyed the statue of George
III—and why they keep bringing it back. Locating the statue’s
destruction in a transatlantic space of radical protest and
material violence—and tracing its resurrection through pictures
and performances—Bellion advances a history of American art that
looks beyond familiar narratives of paintings and polite spectators
to encompass a riotous cast of public sculptures and liberty poles,
impassioned crowds and street protests, performative smashings and
yearning re-creations. Bellion argues that iconoclasm mobilized a
central paradox of the national imaginary: it was at once a
destructive phenomenon through which Americans enacted their
independence and a creative phenomenon through which they continued
to enact British cultural identities. Persuasive and engaging,
Iconoclasm in New York demonstrates how British monuments gave rise
to an American creation story. This fascinating cultural history
will captivate art historians, specialists in iconoclasm, and
general readers interested in American history and New York City.
November 19, 1479: a dynastic alliance, two noble scions, a regal
wedding, short-lived and with an unhappy ending. These pages
reconstruct the story of the magnificent bas relief in the Acton
Collection (Villa La Pietra, Florence), commissioned to celebrate
the marriage between Antonio Basso Della Rovere, nephew of Pope
Sixtus IV, and Caterina Marzano d'Aragona, the niece of King
Ferdinand I of Naples. The heraldic symbols of the three coats of
arms leave no doubt about the identities of the characters and
events surrounding its creation, and lead us to the original
location of the work, born as the overdoor to the main portal of
the Basso Della Rovere Palace in piazza della Maddalena in Savona.
Through close examination of the Della Rovere in Rome, this study
highlights some previously unknown facts about the family's origins
and returns to Savona and its role as a political, cultural, and
artistic protagonist in late 15th-century Italy.
atelierJAK has been working on the film project Soul Blindness for
a number of years. The main character in the film is JAK, who
suffers from visual agnosia. Soul Blindness does not have a
preconceived script. The plot of the film develops further with
each exhibition and each artwork, until there are finally thirty
film clips, each of them exactly three minutes long. This makes it
possible to continuously develop both the storyline itself and the
setting ever further. The publication provides insights into the
exhibition FAULTY REVERIES. It presents sculptures and
installations that enter into interaction with one another, become
props, and form the backdrops for the film through their interplay.
Besides sculpture, drawing, writing, and language, the use of
digital processes also plays a significant role. Text in English
and German.
Latest production of Cuban artist, Adrian Fernandez, concerned with
the impact of material culture, history and memory on contemporary
man. Interested in the symbols that represent ideologies and that
construct collective identities, he searches in his photography for
the memory of the historical past and its impact on his cultural
present. His work is organised in series that sometimes
interconnect and complement each other. Each new series is a
consequence of the previous one, with similar concerns and
interests, from black and white photography with a documentary
perspective, to studio photography, to the use of digital media and
colour photography. His sculptural work is developed in
installations, in which he uses assemblage and welding of metal and
carbon steel. Text in English and Spanish.
Providing the first thorough study of sculptural portraiture in
18th-century Britain, this important book challenges both the idea
that portrait necessarily implies painting and the assumption that
Enlightenment thought is manifest chiefly in French art. By
considering the bust and the statue as genres, Malcolm Baker, a
leading sculpture scholar, addresses the question of how these
seemingly traditional images developed into ambitious forms of
representation within a culture in which many core concepts of
modernity were being formed. The leading sculptor at this time in
Britain was Louis Francois Roubiliac (1702-1762), and his portraits
of major figures of the day, including Alexander Pope, Isaac
Newton, and George Frederic Handel, are examined here in detail.
Remarkable for their technical virtuosity and visual power, these
images show how sculpture was increasingly being made for close and
attentive viewing. The Marble Index eloquently establishes that the
heightened aesthetic ambition of the sculptural portrait was
intimately linked with the way in which it could engage viewers
familiar with Enlightenment notions of perception and selfhood.
Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art
Memory Work demonstrates the evolution of the pioneering minimalist
sculptor Anne Truitt. An artist determined to make her way through
a new aesthetic in the 1960s, Truitt was tireless in her pursuit of
a strong cultural voice. At the heart of her practice was the key
theme of memory, which enabled her not only to express personal
experience but also to address how perception was changing for a
contemporary viewership. She gravitated toward the idea that an
object in one's focus could unleash a powerful return to the past
through memory, which in turn brings a fresh, even critical,
attention to the present moment. In addition to the artist's own
popular published writings, which detail the unique challenges
facing female artists, Memory Work draws on unpublished
manuscripts, private recordings, and never-before-seen working
drawings to validate Truitt's original ideas about the link between
perception and mnemonic reference in contemporary art. De Baca
offers an insider's view of the artist's unstinting efforts to
realize her artistic vision, as well as the cultural, political,
and historical resonances her oeuvre has for us today.
Known for his ephemeral, interconnected installations and
monumental sculpture, Argentinian artist Adrian Villar Rojas (b.
1980) transformed The Met Roof into an immersive banquet scene for
the 2017 Roof Garden Commission. This book retraces the artist's
process by illustrating his conversations and discoveries at The
Met, which informed an installation that negotiates the museum as
both a social space and a space for the display of art. Villar
Rojas merges these institutional functions by framing art within
the context of a party where viewers and artworks can directly
interact. The publication, an integral part of Villar Rojas's
installation, covers themes as diverse as museology, history, and
the activation of art-offering a meditation on how museums as
artifacts represent and historicize art.
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Antony Gormley
(Hardcover)
Antony Gormley; Text written by Martin Caiger-Smith, Michael Newman, Priyamvada Natarajan, Jeanette Winterson
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R1,626
R1,211
Discovery Miles 12 110
Save R415 (26%)
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Out of stock
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In 1962, Ernst Scheidegger published his first book using his own
name as an imprint. This book was the German edition of Jean
Genet's essay on Alberto Giacometti. The great artist and close
personal friend of Ernst Scheidegger has been subject of a number
of books published by Verlag Ernst Scheidegger and Verlag
Scheidegger & Spiess since. The most successful of them has
been "Traces of a Friendship - Alberto Giacometti", first published
in 1990 and reprinted several times. To mark the 50th anniversary
of Verlag Ernst Scheidegger / Verlag Scheidegger & Spiess
present a new, completely revised and expanded edition of this
classic. It includes around 40 previously unpublished colour images
which have recently been discovered in Ernst Scheidegger's archive.
They add an intimate new chapter to this legendary book. In
addition to the more accurate dating of some photographs' the
essays and captions have been revised and expanded also. Text in
English and German.
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