Ruins have long occupied a special place in human imagination. From ancient temples and abandoned factories to crumbling urban spaces, decay has been interpreted as both an end and a beginning. In contemporary sculpture and installation art, ruins are no longer viewed only as historical remnants. They have become active sources of inspiration, shaping artistic language, material choices, and conceptual […]
The most famous post-war ‘definition’ of sculpture has it that ‘sculpture is what you bump into when you back up to look at a painting’. Usually attributed to American abstract painter and wit Ad Reinhardt (1913–1967), it was no doubt partly prompted by the frustration many modern painters feel when they have to share gallery space with large sculptures that […]
Greek and Roman statues were often painted, but assumptions about race and aesthetics have suppressed this truth. Now scholars are making a color correction. Mark Abbe was ambushed by color in 2000, while working on an archeological dig in the ancient Greek city of Aphrodisias, in present-day Turkey. At the time, he was a graduate student at New York University’s […]
Among the oldest sculptures discovered to date is the Lion-man, which was found in 1939 in a German cave. It is between 35,000 and 40,000 years old and belongs to the prehistoric period, or the period before the invention of writing. Another iconic prehistoric sculpture is Venus of Willendorf, a 4.4 inch figurine portraying a woman. It was found in Austria and is estimated to have been carved between 24,000 […]