Sculpture

About

Sculpture shares real space with its viewers, so it can be walked around and seen in changing light. Its traditional methods are few: carving away stone, wood or ivory; modelling clay or wax; casting bronze or plaster from a mould; and, since the early 20th century, constructing from parts. Some of the oldest known images are sculptures, such as the mammoth-ivory figures from the Swabian Jura, around 40,000 years old.

Each culture shaped its own ideals. Egyptian carvers set figures in a frontal stride; Greek sculptors developed contrapposto; copper-alloy heads from Ife in present-day Nigeria (12th–15th centuries) balance naturalism with calm; Gian Lorenzo Bernini made marble seem to turn into leaves in Apollo and Daphne (1622–25). Modernists from Auguste Rodin to Barbara Hepworth rethought mass and surface, and later artists turned to welded steel, industrial fabrication, light and sound. Notice the base and how a work meets the floor.