Balance
Works that play with equilibrium: forms held in poise, hung from a single point, or leaning on one another against gravity.
No works indexed yet · 10 related artists
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About
Balance is a physical problem before it is a visual one. A sculpture has to stand, hang or lean, and many artists make that struggle part of the subject. Greek sculptors found one answer in contrapposto: the weight carried on one leg, as in Polykleitos's Doryphoros (about 440 BC), lets a figure look relaxed yet stable. Gian Lorenzo Bernini later set marble figures in twisting poses that seem to defy their own mass.
In the 20th century balance often became the work itself. Alexander Calder's mobiles, made from the early 1930s, suspend sheet-metal shapes from wire arms so the whole piece shifts in a draught. Marta Pan made sculptures that float and turn on water, and Richard Serra propped heavy metal plates against each other with no fixings at all. Look for pivots, cantilevers and leaning parts that make gravity visible.
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