Contemporary Art: Sculpture and Videoart installation - Giuseppe Alletto visual artist

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Contemporary Art: Sculpture and Videoart installation - Giuseppe Alletto visual artist

The term “contemporary sculpture” in art historiography emerged in the mid-1960s and 1970s as a way to differentiate it from modern sculpture. Contemporary sculpture does not represent any particular artistic style; rather, it promotes an opening of the specific field of art to the point of blurring the boundaries between disciplines through experimentation.

Contemporary sculpture has expanded and multiplied the possibilities of sculpture as an art form. Contemporary sculpture artists have gone above and beyond their predecessors and reinvented this art form’s characteristics, techniques, and materials.

Contemporary Sculpture History
In the field of sculpture, the canon defined in classical Greece remained approximately unchanged until the end of the 19th century, the beginning of modern art. While Auguste Rodin‘s works at the 1900 Paris Universal Exposition represented a break from the sculptural tradition, sculptural art underwent the most profound evolution in parallel with the avant-garde of modern painting.

Modern art faced centuries old traditions and proposed new ways to understand the concept and function of art, gradually abandoning the imitation of nature. Surrealism, abstraction, expressionism, and cubism paved the way for contemporary sculpture as we know it.

Modern artists such as Alberto Giacometti and Alexander Calder created strong precedents for contemporary sculptors. Giacometti’s sculptural expressionism is based on the representation of feelings rather than the representation of objective reality. His elongated and extremely thin human figures are an accurate reflection of the experiences of World War II.

The artist and mechanical engineer Calder combined aesthetics, movement, and balance. One of his best-known works is the Mobile series. It consisted of abstract sculptures that moved, either by an engine or by air currents, something totally innovative.

The works of Giacometti and Calder parted from the aesthetic conventions of art education in the academies between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and developed new expressive possibilities for sculpture. Their influence, combined with the economic growth and technological advancements after WWII, gave rise to a new era for sculpture art.

Contemporary Sculpture Characteristics
Contemporary sculpture proposes a radical redefinition of the concept of sculpture. The main characteristic of contemporary sculpture is the definitive break with the past and the search for innovation.

The values of classical sculpture, such as the faithful representation of nature, the search for beauty, balance, symmetry, and harmony were abandoned. Contemporary sculpture artists moved away from the naturalistic representation of the human figure, giving way to geometric figures, movement, space, subjectivity, communicative and political qualities of art among other themes.

Commemorative, religious, and moral functions are also lost. Contemporary sculptures are no longer the vehicles of abstract thought and ethics as they once were. That is why, in this period, new functions and meanings are sought. These changes imply that artists do not seek to pigeonhole themselves to a particular style, and coexist with other artistic languages.

Contemporary Sculpture Techniques
Contemporary sculpture artists can be distinguished primarily by experimentation. At the beginning of the twentieth century, new techniques such as assemblage, forging, cement casting, and concrete emerged. The post-war period marked technological advances in electronics and telecommunications. Artists began to incorporate welding, soldering and cutting of metal, which became a popular medium by many artists including Pablo Picasso. In search of innovation, sculptors then started combining these novel methods with traditional techniques such as carving, molding, and casting.

Contemporary Sculpture Materials
The irruption of Marcel Duchamp‘s “Fountain” (1917) brought a new concept: the readymade. This idea proposed that any everyday object could be art. Thus, a urinal, a bottle holder, an iron, or a bicycle can be a work of art. Influenced by Duchamp, sculpture artists began to include non-artistic elements in their works, such as industrial waste, newspaper, foodstuffs, recycled objects, and materials taken from nature such as earth, leaves, and branches.

Contemporary sculptors also use materials such as iron, resins, plastics, clay, metals, wood, concrete, polyester, polyethylene, latex, and even combine these materials with traditional ones like marble.