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Artworks: New Forms
"The material takes on a new form and the sculptor discovers new content and new meaning."
Tony Cragg, 1996
In the wake of the Pop and Conceptual art movements of the 1960s, a number of artists felt alienated from the tenets of Modernism laid down in the first decades of the twentieth century. Sometimes identified as post-modernists, these artists revisited historical, literary, and formal conventions, while at the same time pioneering new advances in materials and techniques. In sculpture, one result of this shift was a surge of new imagery that dealt directly with the phenomena of perception and memory.
Bryan Hunt questions artistic genres through his recreation of cascades in his Arch Falls. Joel Shapiro and Jim Love reenter the world of childhood through their outsized evocations of such toys as a simple marionette or an abandoned football, while in New Forms Tony Cragg suggests the elemental metamorphoses that continually shape our lives.
Direct casting techniques that allow artists to replicate organic matter with remarkable realism became increasingly available in the 1980s and 1990s. Two sculptors who have found poetry in this method are Linda Ridgway and Joseph Havel. Ridgway's The Dance is cast from a grapevine the grew in the artist's backyard; its remarkable naturalism fittingly complements the plants and vines that thrive in the Cullen Sculpture Garden. Havel's Exhaling Pearls is an improbable hybrid; cast from a rope and two paper lanterns, it rises up in a playfully gallant affirmation of life and creation.
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© Photography by Rocky Kneten
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