The Bruce Museum showcases 45 masterpieces of modern sculpture in its major winter exhibition, “Innovations in the Third Dimension: Sculpture of Our Time,” illustrating how virtually every time-honored idea about sculpture has been challenged in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries. Opening on Saturday, January 24, and running through Sunday, May 24, the exhibition addresses the radical changes in the size, media, presentation and techniques of sculpture that have created exciting and startling new possibilities for the medium.
Early works in the exhibition include examples by the late Nineteenth Century genius Auguste Rodin and early Twentieth Century Modernists such as Alexander Archipenko and Alexander Calder. Mid-Twentieth Century sculptures by Louise Nevelson, Henry Moore, David Smith and others are on view with more recent, cutting-edge contemporary sculpture by Marc Quinn, Antony Gormley, Do Ho Suh and the artistic team of Sue Webster and Tim Noble, among others.
Rodin is the first in a long line of artists in this exhibition concerned with the depiction of the human body. Exhibition highlights that focus on the innovation of the figure include works by British sculptor Henry Moore and American artist Duane Hanson. Moore introduced the use of punctured space †the hole †that allows the modeled figure to fuse with the landscape. Hanson broke with the tradition of portrait sculpture, which for millennia has served to flatter, by employing the ultrarealist technique of casting directly from the human body to present a revolutionary new subject: blue-collar America. On view is Hanson’s “Cement Worker,” one of his startlingly realistic subjects.
During the modern and postmodern eras, figuration has remained a steady source of inspiration for a broad variety of international artists. The exhibition offers numerous examples. Columbian artist Fernando Botero created “Lovers,” two rotund nudes of highly disproportionate size, which were modeled in the smooth, rounded bronze masses we instantly recognize as the artist’s signature style. By contrast, Keith Haring’s “Capoeira Dancers” seems to have jumped directly out of the brilliant draftsmanship of his subway drawings. Three women artists in this exhibition, Louise Bourgeois, Niki de Saint-Phalle and Susy Gómez, bring their own feminine viewpoints to figuration, investigating such issues as domesticity, motherhood and the ambiguity of male and female roles.
The innovations of Cubism opened quite different avenues than those afforded by figuration. Included in the show is Archipenko’s elegant “Madonna of the Rocks,” a fully realized expression of Cubist principles. The Modernist interest in motion in sculpture is represented by a “mobile” and a “stabile” by Calder, as well as a motorized sculpture by José de Rivera.
Numerous works in the exhibition illustrate that sculpture is no longer a representation merely in bronze or marble, including Charles Long’s environmental statement, which incorporates river sediment and debris, Do Ho Suh’s “Bathroom” of translucent nylon and Ashley Bickerton’s sculpture of blue chemical, coral, Cheez Doodles and broken glass. Isamu Noguchi’s use of novel modern materials in “Lunar” and, his early use of sculptural light is a significant contribution.
Nevelson, who utilized scavenged wood for her elegant, monochrome works, and John Chamberlain, who utilized welded, crushed automobile parts as his primary medium, were two artists profoundly influenced by the idea of the “found object” as art.
Other artists transformed everyday objects in many startling ways. Claes Oldenburg’s 1963 “Soft Pay-Telephone (Ghost Version),” Robert Gober’s “Cat Litter” and Liza Lou’s “Joy and Comet” are examples. Robert Indiana’s “Love,” one of the most recognizable Pop images of the Twentieth Century, is a highlight of the exhibition.
A generation of sculptors began to experiment with welded metal abstractions in the 1940s and 1950s, including Smith, whose work changed the nature of sculpture in America, bringing a new passion, seriousness, and identity to the medium in this country.
In the Twenty-First Century, digital technology opens novel sculptural possibilities. Karin Sander’s “Unlimited (Statue of Jennifer Stockman)” and Xavier Veilhan’s “David” use technology to generate hyperrealist, three-dimensional portrait sculpture using a technologically sophisticated scanning procedure as its starting point.
The Bruce Museum is at 1 Museum Drive. For information, www.brucemuseum.org or 203-869-0376.
