Category: Sculpture

Composition Light

Composition Light is a project recently completed by Canadian born designer Miya Kondo. The collection is comprised of a series of light sculptures that vary in size and colour. Used in combination, the objects can create different effects. Depending on the position of the elements and their relation to each other, the quality of light is modified and the ambiance of the space altered.

Miya Kondo explains:

Light acts as an interpreter for how we experience space – our emotional experience of space, time and place. We can be captivated by the influence of light on the shape of objects, on the atmosphere around us and the feeling of our surroundings.

The installation of the Composition Light project recently took place during the Dutch Design Week 2011.

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Sculpting Sound

The Swiss artist Zimoun is currently exhibiting his latest installation at the Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota, Florida (USA), which runs until January 08 2012. Zimoun, previously featured on Minimalissimo, builds architecturally-minded platforms of sound using simple and functional components, which result in unique and quite beautiful soundscapes.

The Sculpting Sound installation, curated by Matthew McLendon is an example of structural simplicity in an industrial-like setting, which reveals an intricate relationship between the artificial and the organic. Zimoun’s creations often use multiples of the same prepared mechanical elements to examine the creation and degeneration of patterns.

If I was in the vicinity, this would be a must-see. Fantastic.

→ Watch the Sculpting Sound video

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Steel Landscapes

These minimalist wall sculptures by Cecilia Vissers are made from steel and aluminium and inspired by the Scottish and Irish landscapes. The pieces are characterized by simple compositions, powerful lines and laconic shapes. The surfaces retain the natural texture of the material, creating inspiring visual effects.

I want my sculptures to be entirely simple, to be viewed quickly, the focus is on the smooth and flat surface, my abstractions are grounded in the landscapes of Scotland and Ireland, the remoteness and silence.

Cecilia Vissers’ work will be displayed as part of a group show at Acquire Space in London from November 13-27, 2011 and in a solo exhibition at Masters & Pelavin Gallery in New York, February 23 to April 5, 2012.

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Luisa Chillida

Luisa Chillida is a Spain-based artist full of creativity and imagination.

I really like her stunning and minimalist sculptures, mostly made of letters and lines.

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Zimoun

Swiss artist Zimoun uses sound in order to create magic.

His work is very minimal, based on reductive methods, aesthetics and simplicity, Zimoun creates artificial simple systems, which generate very complex and somehow living structures in sound and motion.

He has received the 2010 Prix Ars Electronica: The clean, elegant sound sculptures combine visual, sonic, and spatial elements in an organically balanced entirely artwork. Using simple and well conceived mechanical systems, Zimouns‘s work transforms and activates the space.

I simply love it. See Zimoun works.

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Memes

Memes is a series of sculptures by British-sculptor Antony Gormley, recently exhibited at Anna Schwartz Gallery in Melbourne, Australia. According to the publication on the work released by Anna Schwartz in conjunction to the exhibition, Gormley states that the project started as an investigation into scale and modular construction.

Of the work, Anna Schwartz Gallery says:

A Meme is a cultural analogue to a gene. Forms that are transmitted in thought or behaviour from one body to another, responding to conditional environments, self-replicating and capable of mutation.

The miniature or the model allows the totality of a body to be seen at once. These small solid iron works use the formal language of architecture to replace anatomy and construct volumes to articulate a range of 32 body postures. The ambition is to make intelligible forms that form an abstract lexicon of body-posture but which nevertheless carry the invitation of empathy and the transmission of states of mind.

Displayed widely spaced within the architecture of Anna Schwartz Gallery in Melbourne, the works interface with the architecture of the gallery. Placed directly on the floor they become acupuncture points within the volume of the space, allowing the viewer to become conscious, through the disparity of scale, of his/her own mass and spatial displacement as s/he moves around and amongst the works.

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Spirit Structures

England-based artist Ben Long has been making a series of work called Spirit Structures, which are geometric sculptures made out of spirt levels.

His website explains:

The Minimalists employed manufacturing processes as a rejection of expression, as a way to avoid what they viewed as self-referential complacency in their work. Long adopts this approach, not necessarily to mirror this detached austerity, but as a way to relate his own sculptures to the techniques of replication that enable goods like the spirit level to be widely available for domestic consumption.

I find Ben Long’s dealings with Minimalism in this work fascinating.

Pictured here are Modular Spirit Structure (Fisco L52 series) and Two Part Modular Spirit Structure (Fisco L25 series) both from 2010, and an isometric projection for a new Spirit Structure, which is currently in the works. The new Spirit Structure is the first of the large scale Spirit Structures. This particular one encompasses the phenomenon known as “strange loops”, which you might be familiar with from the graphic works of Escher.

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Alogon

In 1966, Robert Smithson created a series of works called Alogon. The second piece in the series was exhibited at the seminal exhibition of minimalist work called Primary Structures in 1966. This piece is currently in the Museum of Modern Art collection. Of the work, Oxford University Press says:

[E]ach [work is] composed of a number of step structures arranged in order of decreasing size, conveying Smithson’s belief in the illogical and absurd nature of existence. Though each of the parts is static, their dynamic arrangement introduces tension into the work as a whole.

I hadn’t seen this work until recently, but find it interesting to look at in comparison to his bigger land-art works, such as Spiral Jetty.

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Larry Bell

Larry Bell has had a long and varied career, and also influential enough to land himself on the cover of The Beatles’ 1967 album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

Born in 1939 in Chicago, Illinois, and now based in Toas, New Mexico and Venice, California, his earliest work were, like Donald Judd, Abstract-expressionist paintings.

In the 1960s, Bell began making some of his most recognisable works: Cube structures that sit on transparent plinths. Three of these works were featured in the influential 1966 minimalist exhibition Primary Structures, which also featured the work of Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, Ellsworth Kelly, Carl Andre and Sol LeWitt (amongst others).

I often see people disregard the relationship between the plinth and a sculpture, and furthermore the plinth’s sculptural presence. It’s always refreshing to look at Bell’s work, because he brings an awareness to the plinth by making it part of the work itself.

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Carl Andre

American minimalist artist, Carl Andre (1935) is known for his geometrical arrangement of commercial and natural materials such as bricks, blocks and plates.

His most significant contribution was to distance sculpture from processes of carving, modeling, or constructing, and to make works that simply involved sorting and placing.

Andre has sought to renegociate conventions of display, forcing a dialogue between the object and its surrouding.

Carl Andre has received this year the Switzerland’s 2011 Roswitha Haftmann Foundation Prize.

I love it because the artist does not want his sculptures to have a fixed view point, but to be experienced as more than areas or paths.

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