The Resurgence of Sculpture: Modern Artists Making Their Mark

After decades overshadowed by paintings and photography, sculpture is experiencing a contemporary renaissance. Cutting-edge artists are pushing the medium in bold new directions, reinvigorating public engagement. These innovators are ensuring sculpture remains compellingly relevant through their masterful investigations of form, scale, process, materials and meaning. Their boundary-pushing creations are driving a new golden age for dimensional art.

Exploring New Processes

Artists are realizing novel artistic processes in sculpture:

Thomas Houseago – Creates massive figurative sculptures by draping wet clay over live models and letting it dry into abstraction. This captures candid movement.

Rachel Whiteread – Pours plaster into architectural negative spaces like the undersides of chairs or abandoned house interiors to cast their voids into being. This imparts ghosts of forgotten objects.

Jorge Pardo – CNC-mills giant vibrantly-colored organic forms from laminated blocks of wood. This imbues digital design with handcrafted warmth.

Maya Lin – Employs computer modeling and satellite imagery to map optimal contours for her flowing earthwork landscapes and watershed-inspired reliefs.

Jeffrey Mongrain – Hand carves fantastical creatures, masks and skulls from the layered composites of his own painted sketches using a unique style of bas relief.

Reimagining Scale

Monumentality grabs attention:

Richard Serra – Creates massive steel maze-like passages that overwhelm and disorient viewers through pure weight, height and mass. Being dwarfed by the sculptures proves intensely experiential.

Thomas Schütte – Crafts enormous ceramic heads and figures, some over 15 feet tall, with highly varied simplified facial features that project cryptic inner moods through scale.

Ron Mueck – Sculpts meticulously realistic human figures at drastic miniaturized or enlarged scales to visually confound perspective. The divergent sizes amplify the emotive impact.

Exploring New Materials

Artists tap into the potential of surprising new media:

Goshka Macuga – Hand knits striking tapestries depicting contemporary public gatherings out of polyethylene fibers instead of wool, giving a modern industrial twist to a traditional technique.

Courtney Mattison – Crafts porcelain coral reef sculptures embellished with intricate surface patterns that highlight the impacts of climate change and ocean acidification on marine ecosystems.

Richard Dupont – Digitally scans body parts then manipulates the files to 3D print distorted, fragmented figural sculptures in modern materials like polymers and composites. This riffs on classical forms using new technology.

Contemporary sculptors like these invigorate the field by investigating uncharted creative territory at the intersection of art, science, nature and imagination. Their groundbreaking output ensures an exciting future lies ahead.