Sculpture can be created through subtractive processes like carving or additive processes like modeling or casting. Common materials include stone, wood, metal, and clay. Modern sculpture incorporates new materials and techniques like assemblage, readymades, mixed media, kinetic sculpture, light sculpture, and land art. Sculpture is an important art form that allows artists to express themselves in three dimensions and create emotional responses in viewers.

1. Chapter 9
Sculpture

2. Introduction
• What is sculpture?
• Why is sculpture important to us?
• Why does sculpture create an emotion
in humans?
• Why have we felt the need to create
sculptures and monumental sculptures
throughout our history?

3. Sculpture
Sculpture - The art of carving, casting,
modeling, or assembling materials into
three-dimensional figures or forms

4. Subtractive and Additive Types
of Sculpture
Subtractive Process - Carving, unwanted
materials are removed.
Additive Process - Modeling, Casting,
Construction

5. Carving
• Carving - removing portions of a block
of material to create a form.
• Can use stone, wood, ivory, chocolate…

6. Bernini: The Blessed Ludovica Albertoni 1674

7. Giuseppe Penone: Propagation 1970

8. Modeling
Modeling - using a pliable material, such
as clay or wax, the artist shapes the
material into a 3D form.
• Can be done by hand or tools.

10. Casting
Casting - liquid metal material is poured
into a mold to create a form.
Mold - the form into which the material is
poured and imparts its shape.
• Any material that hardens can be used
for casting.
• One of the oldest and most common is
Bronze.

11. George Segal: The Holocaust 1982

12. Joseph Havel: Drape 1999

13. Rachel Whiteread: Stairs 1991

14. Construction
Constructed sculpture - forms are built
from materials such as wood, paper,
string, sheet metal, and wire.

15. Types of Materials
• Stone
• Wood
• Clay
• Metal

16. Stone
• Stone is extremely hard
• It is also very durable
• Appropriate for monuments and
statues
• Stone tools include the chisel and mallet
• Artists also use contemporary power
tools

17. Reena Spauldings: Marble Surfboards 2000

18. Wood
• Wood can be carved, scraped, drilled,
polished, molded and bent.
• Different types of woods vary in how hard
they are.
• Wood appeals to sculpture artists, because of
its grain, color, and workability.
• Wood is easier to carve than stone.
• Tensile strength - the inherent strength of a
material.

19. Isaac Resnikoff : Jersey Barrier 1999

20. Clay
• Clay is more pliable than stone or wood
– Clay is not very strong.
– Nor is is permanent.
• Armature - an inner skeleton normally
made of metal, used to help give clay
additional strength.

21. David Zink Yi : Architeuthis 2010

22. Metal
• Metals can be cast, extruded, forged,
stamped, drilled, filed, and burnished.
• Cast bronze sculptures
• Direct-metal sculptures - Assembling
sculpture by welding, riveting, and
soldering.
• Patinas - the colors created on bronze
due to oxidation.

23. Figure 9.12, p.185: RICHARD SERRA. Installation view, Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, Spain.

24. Modern and Contemporary
Materials and Methods
Throughout history sculptors have searched for
new forms of expression.
• Constructed sculpture
• Assemblage
• Readymades
• Mixed media
• Kinetic sculpture
• Light sculpture
• Land art

25. Figure 9.14, p.186: CLAES OLDENBURG. Soft Toilet (1966). Vinyl filled with kapok painted with Liquitex,
and wood. 57 1⁄16” x 27 5⁄8” x 28 1⁄16”.

26. Assemblage
• A form of constructed sculpture
• Pre-existing or found objects take on a
new form as artwork
• Novel combinations that take on a new
life and meaning
• One of the best-known examples is
Picasso’s Bull’s Head

27. Pablo Picasso: Bull’s Head 1942

28. Readymades
• Found objects can be elevated to works
of art on pedestals, such as Duchamp’s
urinal, turned upside down.
• This is a 20th-century artistic trend
• No assembly is needed for this artform

29. Marcel Duchamp: Fountain 1917

30. Mixed Media
Mixed Media - Use materials and found
objects that are not normally elements
of a work of art.
• Artists, such as Rauschenberg (see
Ch. 20), may attach other materials to
their canvases.
• What might be some the materials you
could use in a Mixed Media sculpture?

31. Robert Rauschenberg: Monogram 1955

32. Kinetic Sculpture
Kinetic sculpture - Sculptures that move, art +
action. Example: the mobile.
Forms of movement might include:
• Wind
• Magnetic fields
• Jets of water
• Electric motors
• The intensity of light
• Human manipulations

33. Jonathon Schipper: The Slow Inevitable Death of American Muscle 1999

34. Light Sculpture
• Light and its reflections have always
been an important elements in
sculpture (and art!)
• However, “light sculpture” is a 20th-
century artform
• What are the physical and
psychological effects of color and the
creation of illusion?

35. Alfredo Jaar: The Geometry of Consciousness 1999

37. Other Materials
Sculpture today uses not only traditional
materials, but also materials that have
never been used before.
Example: beeswax, microcrystalline wax,
chocolate, styrofoam, etc…

38. Figure 9.22, p.191: JANINE ANTONI. Chocolate Gnaw (1992). Chocolate (600 lb before biting), gnawed by the
artist. 24” x 24” x 24” (61 cm x 61 cm x 61 cm).

39. Urs Fischer: Untitled 2011

41. Matthew Barney: Untitled 2001