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Lead Pencil Studio, “Negative Billboard”, 2015, Blaine, Washington
Lead Pencil Studio created this sculpture from small, blackened stainless steel rods. Assembled together, it creates the negative space of a billboard. This sculpture was created in under a year, fabricated in 6 major pieces The installation took 14 days. The United States federal government commissioned this public art to promote nothing but air and “…the beauty of North American skies.”
Jaume Plensa, “Heads of Nuria and Irma”, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, England
With 30 projects spanning the globe, Jaume Plensa is probably one of the most renowned Catalan sculptors in the contemporary art scene. Though he is mainly known for his large-scale ethereal sculptures, he has worked with a very diverse array of media, ranging from video projections to acoustic installations. Plensa’s work juxtaposes the intellectual and the poetic. Though these two concepts are often mutually exclusive, the artist somehow manages to create extremely evocative sculptures with a strong conceptual basis.
While many conceptual artists feel the urge to refuse beauty in order to convey an idea, the beauty and romanticism of Plensa’s sculptures manage to provide tangibility to his ideas. One of the many aspects in which the artist manages to do so is by introducing his works in the public space, thus allowing his sculptures to be animated by the city and its inhabitants.
Ervin Loranth Herve, “Popped Up”. Szechenyi Square, Budapest
Artist Ervin Loránth Hervé created an impressive sculpture called “Popped Up” that depicts a giant man crawling out of the earth. The polystyrene sculpture is located at Széchenyi Square in Budapest, Hungary, and was one of the highlights for the Art Market Budapest 2014 international contemporary art fair.
Huang Yong Ping, “Ressort”, Aluminum and Stainless Steel, Queensland Art Gallery, Australia
The twisting metal sculpture “Ressort” rises out of a pool and extends 174 feet (53 meters). Currently on view at the Queensland Art Gallery is Ressort, a 174-foot (53 meters). The work by Huang Yong Ping was commissioned for the Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art. The serpent is considered good fortune in Chinese culture and is prominent in Ping’s work.
Richard Jackson, “Bad Dog”, 2013, Fiberglass, Orange County Museum of Art
Born in 1939, Richard Jackson has been a pre-eminent figure on the American art scene since the 70s and is influenced by both abstract expressionism and action painting. As part of his retrospective at the Orange County Museum of Art, Jackson had installed “Bad Dog”, a giant temporary sculpture of a black labrador “urinating” yellow paint onto the side of the museum.
Sculptural Installations by Robert Therrien
Born in 1947, Robert Therrien was an American artist known known for his large-scale sculptures. His work reimagined and reinvented objects from everyday life, such as a set of table and chairs or stacks of plates, turning them into monumental immersive sculptures. Los Angeles-based, Therrien was described as being possessed by a sense of wonder over commonplace experiences.
The artist’s solo exhibition at the The Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2000 examined the work at what proved to be a crucial moment in his career. The show featured monumental new sculptures, including the 1994 “Under the Table”, “No Title”, a stack of blue plastic plates originally exhibited in 1999, and three gigantic beards.
“Therrien has been making exquisitely crafted sculptures that are easily recognized as objects encountered in the daily world. Yet, however recognizable the object, the sense of estrangement in these new sculptures is more pronounced than ever before.” – critic Christopher Knight
Anish Kapoor, “Memory”, Cor-Ten Steel Installation, 2008, Deutsche Guggenheim Museum, Berlin
Anish Kapoor’s 2008 “Memory” is a site-specific work that was conceived to engage two different exhibition locations at the Guggenheim museums in Berlin and New York. Utilizing Cor-Ten steel for the first time, the sculpture represents a milestone in Kapoor’s career. Memory’s thin steel skin, only eight millimeters thick, suggests a form that is ephemeral and unmonumental. The sculpture appears to defy gravity as it gently glances against the periphery of the gallery walls and ceiling. However, as a 24-ton volume, Memory is also raw, industrial, and foreboding.
Positioned tightly within the gallery, Memory is never fully visible; instead the work fractures and divides the gallery into several distinct viewing areas. The division compels visitors to navigate the museum, searching for vantage points that offer only glimpses of the sculpture. This processional method of viewing Memory is an intrinsic aspect of the work. Visitors are asked to contemplate the ensuing fragmentation by attempting to piece together images retained in their minds, exerting effort in the act of seeing—a process Kapoor describes as creating a “mental sculpture.”
Memory’s rusting exterior creates a powdery surface, which relates this commission to Kapoor’s early pigment pieces from the 1980s. Rather than necessitating an additional coat of paint to smooth the interior curvature, the sculpture’s Cor-Ten tiles, perfectly manufactured to prevent light from seeping through, create the necessary conditions for darkness within. The work’s square aperture—wedged precisely into one of the gallery’s walls—allows a view into this boundless interior void.
The endless darkness seems to contradict what visitors know about the work’s delimited exterior. This contradiction between the known and the perceived is one of Kapoor’s central interests. The window also defines a two-dimensional plane that can be read as a painting rather than an opening. Kapoor’s interest in this pictorial effect is best reflected in his statement “I am a painter working as a sculptor.”
Installation Works by Sandy Skoglund
Skoglund is an American photographer and installation artist. Skoglund creates surrealist images by building elaborate sets or tableaux, furnishing them with carefully selected colored furniture.