Bøger af Dr. Penelope Curtis

By taking simple ways of looking at sculpture, this book uncovers unexpected affinities between works of very different periods and types. From sundials to mirrors, from graves to way-markers, from fountains to contemporary art, a wide range of illustrated examples expands the definitions of sculpture and proposes that we understand this art as something more fundamental to the way we experience and construct our rites of passage. Penelope Curtis argues that there are some basic functions shared by many kinds of three-dimensional objects, be they more or less obviously sculptural. Even contemporary sculpture, with no apparent purpose, makes use of this deeply embedded vocabulary. Together, the qualities of vertical, horizontal, closed and open are consolidated in the ensemble, which places the viewer at its heart, on the threshold of sculpture and on the threshold of change. This book elides the usual notions of figurative and abstract to think instead about how sculpture works. >Published in association with the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

The Human Factor: The Figure in Contemporary Sculpture brings together the work of over 25 leading international artists, in whose practice the human form plays a central role. Over the past 25 years, artists have reinvented figurative sculpture by looking to earlier movements in art history as well as imagery from contemporary culture. Setting up dialogues with modernist as well as classical and archaic models of art, these artists engage and confront the question of how we represent "the human" today. In these works, bodily forms hover between familiarity and an unsettling otherness, between signs of presence and absence, agency and objectification, as artists find novel ways to question our commonplace codes of subjectivity and to challenge our impulse to identify with the anthropomorphic. Eschewing concerns related to psychological portraiture, these artists use the figure as a catalyst for evoking far-ranging content, including subjects spanning political violence and mortality to sexuality and voyeurism. A unique survey of contemporary figurative sculpture, this profusely illustrated volume features works by Pawel Althamer, Frank Benson, Huma Bhabha, Maurizio Cattelan, Urs Fischer, Katharina Fritsch, Ryan Gander, Isa Genzken, Rachel Harrison, Georg Herold, Thomas Hirschhorn, Martin Honert, Pierre Huyghe, Jeff Koons, Paul McCarthy, John Miller, Cady Noland, Ugo Rondinone, Thomas Schütte, Yinka Shonibare, Paloma Varga Weisz, Mark Wallinger, Rebecca Warren, Andro Wekua and Cathy Wilkes, among others.

British artist Alison Wildings conceptual sculptures combine forms and techniques

British artist Nicholas Pope was best known in the 1970s and early