Tag: installation

Xu Zhen

Xu Zhen, “European Thousand-Hand Classical Sculpture” and “Eternity—The Soldier of Marathon Announcing Victory, A Wounded Galatian”, Solo Show at the Long Museum, West Bund Branch, Germany, 2015

With his characteristic humor, Xu Zhen intervenes in all manners of subject matter concerning global culture. With a taut expressiveness, he ingeniously integrates a Western spirit with Eastern culture—a new culture which transcends traditional schemas is hereby born. The all-new creation “European Thousand-Hand Classical Sculpture” assembles 19 different Western classical sculptures of various forms; borrowing from the shape of the Thousand-Hand Guanyin (Bodhisattva) in Buddhist iconography, the work deals with both the sense of form and spirituality, thereby manifesting a vigorous vitality which dumbfounds the audience’s visual perception.  “Eternity—The Soldier of Marathon Announcing Victory, A Wounded Galatian” joins two Western sculptural works; its absurd and yet stunning visual effect perfectly showcases the balance of force and belief.

Anthony McCall

Anthony McCall, “Five Minutes of Pure Sculpture, 2013

The Hamburger Bahnhof, Museum für Gegenwart, in Berlin showed an impressive exhibition by New York-based artist Anthony McCall. For his first solo show at a museum in Germany, McCall displayed the installation “Five Minutes of Pure Sculpture”. Since the ’70s, he has been developing the realm of projections that scratch at the surfaces of cinema, drawing and sculpture. The visitors of the exhibition got to walk into the beam of light and create a new appearance of the light installations/projection. Within 1,000 sq meters, McCall had five single and two double projections that slowly move.

Alexa Meade

Painting Installations by Alexa Meade

Alexa Meade is an American artist best known for her portraits painted on the human body. She takes a classical concept—trompe l’oeil, the art of making a two-dimensional representation look three-dimensional—and works in an opposite direction. Her aim is to collapse depth and make her living models into flat pictures. The result is walking, talking optical illusions, 3D paintings that confuse how the eye processes objects in space.

Meade applies acrylic paint to the surfaces of people, objects, and walls in a style that mimics the appearance of brushwork in a traditional painting. The three dimensional scene may be approached from multiple angles and still appear to be a flat painting through the lens of the camera, without the guise of Photoshop or digital effects.

“The effect of the optical illusion is striking. Many of the images make it nearly impossible to find visual evidence of the secret their construction” – Christian Furr, exhibition curator of the Saatchi Gallery

Cornelia Konrads

Sculptures by

Cornelia Konrads

Cornelia Konrads was born 1957 in Wuppertal, Germany. Even though he studied philosophy and culture-Science, he has been freelancing since 1998. He focuses on site-specific installations and objects. He participates in various sculpture- and Land Art projects in Germany, Netherlands, France, Belgium, Sweden, Italy, USA, Taiwan(wowowowwww), South Korea and Australia.

Daniel Firman

Daniel Firman, “Nasutamanus”, Balancing Elephant, Vienna, 2012

Since 2008, French artist Daniel Firman has been exhibiting various versions of a sculptural installation piece named “Nasutamanus” all over the world. The artwork always depicts an elephant balancing on its trunk, sometimes out from the wall and at other times up from the floor. Most recently, the sculpture was on view at the Kunsthalle Wien in Vienna early in 2012.

Ralph Eaton

Ralph Eaton, “Fuzzy Kudzu”, Stuffed Animals, 2013-14, Taubman Museum

Born in Roanoke, Ralph Eaton was very influenced by the West Coast art scene of the 1990s. Working in Los Angeles at the same time as acclaimed artists Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy, who used re-purposed mundane materials in their works, Eaton saw thrift store cast-offs as symbols of a consumer culture gone awry. Says Eaton: “Making art out of junk is my therapeutic strategy for coping with the human condition, with the clutter of the world.”

At the time, Eaton started buying trash bags full of used stuffed animals to make his works, beginning with a series of “cured teddy bears (curing them of their cuteness by burning and other surgeries).” In the past few years his pieces have grown more abstract, where wall constructions are dominated by red or blue clumps and animals’ faces either missing or buried.

Commissioned by the Taubman Museum of Art, Eaton’s “Fuzzy Kudzu” transforms the City of Roanoke Atrium into an otherworldly fantasyland, where a thirty-foot cascade of white furry tendrils made from restructured stuffed animals spills over the central balcony, countering the building’s architecture in ways both welcoming and unsettling.

Most of its “pelt” is recycled from discarded teddy bears, bunnies, and kittens, each taken apart by the artist and reassembled into over fifty “vines” ranging from twenty to thirty-four feet. Weighing nearly a ton, “Fuzzy Kudzu” is comprised of faux fur fabric, polyester fiberfill, and more than one thousand stuffed animals.

Henrique Oliveira

Henrique Oliveira, “Baitogogo”, Reclaimed Tapumes, 2013, Palais de Tokyo Museum, Paris, France

Designed by Henrique Oliveira to look like an impossibly tangled Gordian Knot, the Baitogogo sculpture was installed within an exhibition space at Palais de Tokyo as a mass of tree-like plywood branches.

The exhibition curators said “ Creating a spectacular and invasive Gordian Knot, Henrique Oliveira plays with Palais de Tokyo’s architecture, allowing a  work that combines the vegetal and the organic.”

The large installation was created from reclaimed tapumes – a plywood material traditionally used in Brazilian towns to construct the hoardings around construction sites. Oliveria collected the discarded tapumes from the streets of São Paulo, where he both lives and works. The veneer-like strips were bent into shape and nailed together to form the installation’s branches. Further wooden veneers were fixed to the structure to give it a bark-like texture and appearance.

Antony Gormley, “Horizon Field”

Antony Gormley, “Horizon Field”;  Photography by David Levene

Located in the mountains of Vorarlberg, Austria, Horizon Field consists of 100 lifesize, cast-iron figures spread over an area of 150 sq km in the communities of Mellau, Schoppernau, Schrocken, Warth, Mittelberg, Lech, Klosterie and Dalaas. The work forms a horizontal line at 2,039 metres above sea level.

The figures in Horizon Field are expected to remain in the Alps for at least two years. Some of the figures in Horizon Field have been placed in isolation while others are easier to reach. All 100 figures were lowered into the meadow fields by helicopters with winches. This will be the last installation of this kind by Antony Gormley.

Janet Echelman

Janet Echelman, Aerial Sculpture, Colored Polyethylene Rope, Boston

The 600 foot work by Janet Echelman was installed in a park in Boston’s Financial District using a cranes and scissor lifts. The orange and magenta netting made of polyethylene rope weighs a ton, and is designed to respond fluidly to wind and weather. It will remain suspended in the Rose Kennedy Greenway between two high-rise buildings across the Greenway through October.

Echelman is based in suburban Brookline. Her sculpture is inspired by ancient fishing nets. She has installed similar works in Seattle; Madrid, Spain; Amsterdam, Netherlands; Sydney, Australia; and other cities.

Patrick Dougherty

Sculptures by Patrick Dougherty, Sapling Branches

In a career spanning four continents and three decades, internationally acclaimed environmental artist Patrick Dougherty has created over two hundred majestic sculptures out of nothing more than saplings.

“I think that part of my work’s allure is its impermanence, the life cycle that is built into the growth and decay of saplings. My focus has always been the process of building a work and allowing those who pass to enjoy the daily changes or drama of building a sculpture as well as the final product. However, the line between trash and treasure is thin, and the sculptures, like the sticks they are made from, begin to fade after two years.  Often the public imagines that a work of art should be made to last, but I believe that a sculpture, like a good flower bed, has its season.” – Patrick Dougherty

Carlos Amorales

Carlos Amorales, “Black Cloud”, Installation, Black Paper Moths

Black Cloud is an installation by Mexican artist Carlos Amorales involving tens of thousands of black paper months affixed to the walls of large interior spaces. The piece was first installed at Yvon Lambert in 2007 and then in a different configuration at an old baroque church in Spain that was converted to a multi-use space called Espacio AV in 2009.

Caitlind Brown and Wayne Garrett

Caitlind Brown and Wayne Garrett, “New Moon”, 2014

New Moon is an interactive shadow and light sculpture from artists Caitlind Brown and Wayne Garrett  that was installed twice in Lexington, Kentucky in February of 2014. Built from 5,500 burnt out incandescent bulbs donated by the community, the sculpture allows viewers to manipulate phases of the moon using a large turnstyle.

Mehmet Ali Uysal

Mehmet Ali Uysal, “Clothespin”, Wood and Metal, Liege, Belgium, 2010

Designed by Turkish artist Mehmet Ali Uysal. this unusual clothespin sculpture which adorns the Chaudfontaine park in the outskirts of Liege, Belgium was especially implemented as part of the Festival of the Five Seasons in 2010. The giant “clipper” appears to be holding on tightly to a mold of land and grass, its original appearance attracting the attention and curiosity of cyclists and various travelers.

Alexander Liberman

Alexander Liberman, “Olympic Illiad”. Steel Sculpture, 1984, Seattle, Washington

“Olympic Iliad” is a 1984 steel sculpture by Alexander Liberman, located in the lawn surrounding the Space Needle at Seattle Center in Seattle, Washington, United States. Liberman, known for his use of industrially manufactured materials, cut giant steel cylinders at varying angles and lengths, painted them an industrial red, and assembled them to form an immense structure that one can walk around and underneath.