The List, Installment 3: Sculpture

I just came from sculpture class, the current project for which involves taking apart a found object and reassembling it. I chose a sweater. I'm unraveling a sweater. By hand. Thread by thread. It's probably the most insane thing I've chosen to do with my time, and I'm pretty sure it's ruining my eyesight, but it's also fascinating to spend hours making my way through all of the minute details of an ordinary object that was probably woven by a machine in mere minutes. So anyway, I've built a couple of armatures out of wire in the interest of wrapping the unraveled thread (the reassembly portion of the assignment) once I've done the slow work of taking it apart. My professor characterized what I'm doing as "making 3D paintings," which makes me really happy. Still no images of new stuff to post yet--I should be building at least one 5'x8' stretcher this weekend, as well as finishing my wood relief painting and some more paper cutout pieces, so it shouldn't be too long. But in the meantime, let's take a break from the overwhelming sea of captivating paintings on The List and look at some sculptural work, shall we?

Hans Arp:






A lot of the shapes in this work actually remind me of Matisse's later abstract drawings. Arp did paintings too, but I've been looking a lot at his reliefs.

Richard Tuttle:




Hans Richter:



Kurt Schwitters:Schwitters' work is pretty dominated by collage, but this piece, Merzbau, is one of the coolest things I've ever read about. He essentially turned his living space into a collage. He just accumulated stuff and formed it into an aesthetic space, and lived inside his art. Yeah.

Constantin Brancusi:


For me, no discussion of sculpture is complete until I've brought up Bird In Space. It's just so exquisitely simple! There's a gorgeous room at the PMA (Philadelphia Museum of Art) filled with Brancusi sculptures and Mondrian paintings. It'll change your life.

I guess that's all for today. I could mention Giacometti or Rodin, but my love of them is not really directly related to anything I'm doing right now, so I'll resist.