CategoriesMedium and Techniques
Soft Sculpture
Sculpture made from fabric, foam, rubber, latex, felt or other pliable materials that sag, stretch, hang or collapse.
No works indexed yet · 10 related artists
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About
Sculpture was long defined by hardness. Soft sculpture gives way to gravity and touch. Claes Oldenburg's stuffed vinyl and canvas objects of the 1960s, from giant hamburgers to the drooping Soft Toilet (1966), made the approach famous, the early ones sewn by Patty Mucha. Around the same time Yayoi Kusama covered chairs, sofas and a rowing boat with stuffed fabric protrusions in her Accumulation works.
In the later 1960s Eva Hesse and Robert Morris used latex, rope and felt so that materials settled into their own shapes rather than fixed geometry. Fibre artists including Magdalena Abakanowicz and Sheila Hicks built hanging forms, and Louise Bourgeois later sewed fabric figures and heads from old clothes and linens. Ernesto Neto's stretched Lycra forms, weighted with spices, hang from ceilings like bodies. Look for how the work is supported, whether it slumps, hangs or is stuffed, and how its surface invites touch.
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