You have to absolutely acknowledge the work of Rachel Whiteread, whose now destroyed concrete casts of an entire house in East London in 1993 remains a haunting memory. ibid.
I think this is one of the great British sculptures of the twentieth century: it’s called Early One Morning and it was made in 1962 by the then new kid on the block Anthony Caro. ibid.
An Exhibit 1958; reconstruction 2011 – Victor Pasmore and Richard Hamilton. ibid.
Counterpoint IX 1973 – Tim Scott. ibid.
Mumdadland 1997 – Gary Webb. ibid.
Richard Long, who had made this work, was one of Caro’s students at St Martin’s in the late sixties ... Chalk Line 1984. ibid.
Carl Andre’s notorious and celebrated Equivalent VIII 1966 otherwise known as The Bricks which caused such a controversy in British art in the ’70s. ibid.
The Burghers of Calais 1884-95: Six men on their way to die; it’s an incredibly powerful sculpture. Tim Marlow Meets s1e3: Tony Bennett, Tim, Sky Arts 2009
The debates that had raged around realism when [Gustave] Courbet was painting also were mirrored in the development of sculpture. Tim Marlow, The Nude: The Enlightenment, Sky Arts 2012
Rodin’s career … the most successful sculptor in many ways of the last one hundred and fifty years. ibid.
What is painting and sculpture for? ibid.
Photography threw down a huge challenge to those who painted or sculpted the human body. ibid.
Bernini: as architect, as sculpture, as painter, the man could do everything. Waldemar Januszczak, Baroque! – From St Peter’s to St Paul’s I, BBC 2013
His work is filled with movement and restless transformation. ibid.
The Baroque loved painted ceilings. ibid.
The first truly global art movement. ibid.
In 1963 artist Dan Flavin began creating sculptures using nothing but that ubiquitous modern lighting unit – the fluorescent tube. Andrew Graham-Dixon, Art of America 3/3: What Lies Beneath, BBC 2011
Michelangelo has achieved the peak of painting and sculpture. Michelangelo: Heart and Stone starring Rutger Hauer & Massimo Odierna & Giancarlo Giannini et al, opening line, Sky Arts 2013
Sculpture is the lantern to painting. Michelangelo
Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it. Michelangelo
In every block of marble I see a statue as plain as though it stood before me, shaped and perfect in attitude and action. I have only to hew away the rough walls that imprison the lovely apparition to reveal it to the other eyes as mine see it. Michaelangelo
She is in ecstasy all right. Her head is thrown back, her mouth is open ... You have to look. You don’t know where to look. Simon Schama’s Power of Art: Bernini, BBC 2006
A nun in the throes of ecstasy ... Bernini knew all about passion: that’s what his art was about. It was this physical intensity that would transform sculpture. ibid.
He could like an alchemist change one material into another: marble into trees, leaves, hair, and of course flesh. ibid.
Bernini arrived in Rome in 1605 just at the time Caravaggio’s punchy street dramas were electrifying the Church. Giving it a new vision of how to move the flock. ibid.
This is Apollo and Daphne. A story of sexual huntings Apollo wants the nymph Daphne. She definitely doesn’t want him. He runs after her and just as he is about to grab her the gods answer her prayers by turning her into a laurel tree. It’s all action sculpture – Apollo breaking his breathless run, his cape and his hair still flying in the wind. ibid.
Bernini is in his early twenties. A Superstar. Someone on whom the almighty and the powerful almost fawn. ibid.
Top that: no-one ever could ... We are looking at the most intense, convulsive drama of the body that any of us experience ... The visualisation of complete bliss. ibid.
I choose a block of marble and chop off whatever I don’t need. Auguste Rodin
Sculpture is the art of the hole and the lump. Auguste Rodin
A wood carver – his name Grinling Gibbons. Carved with Love: The Genius of British Woodwork II: The Glorious Grinling Gibbons, BBC 2013
His carvings adorned the greatest buildings in Britain. ibid.
The greatest wood carver in British history. ibid.
Gibbons had English parents but he was brought up in the Netherlands. ibid.
Henry Moore: the son of a Yorkshire coal miner ... Three hundred sketches: the shelter drawings ... Moore had become a global phenomenon ... Moore produced over six thousand sculptures. Great Artists in Their Own Words II: Out of the Darkness 1939-1966, BBC 2013
Damien Hirst: Mother and Child Divided. Great Artists in Their Own Words III: But is it Art? 1976-1993 Equivalent VIII 1966
Since the Gothic, European sculpture had become overgrown with moss, weeds – all sorts of surface excrescences which completely concealed shape. It has been Brancusi’s special mission to get rid of this overgrowth, and make us once more shape-conscious. To do this he has had to concentrate on very simple direct shapes, to keep his sculpture, as it were, one-cylindered, to refine and polish a single shape to a degree almost too precious ... it may now be no longer necessary to close down and restrict sculpture to the single (static) form unit. We can now begin to open out. To relate and combine together several forms of varied sizes, sections, and directions into one organic whole. Henry Moore, The Sculpture Speaks, 1937
I have always paid great attention to natural forms, such as bones, shells, and pebbles etc. Sometimes for several years running I have been to the same part of the seashore – but each year a new shape of pebble has caught my eye, which the year before, though it was there in hundreds, I never saw ... Pebbles show Nature’s way of working stone. ibid.
The first hole made through a piece of stone is a revelation. The hole connects one side to the other, making it immediately more three-dimensional. A hole can itself have as much shape-meaning as a solid mass. Sculpture in air is possible, where the stone contains only the hole, which is the intended and considered form. The mystery of the hole – the mysterious fascination of caves in hill sides and cliffs. ibid.
From the moment she met Ben Nicholson, Barbara [Hepworth] abandoned her figurative style and converted to Ben’s modernist cause. Dr James Fox, The Art of Cornwall, BBC 201
With Nicholson and Hepworth the new outpost of international modernism had been formed here. ibid.
Garbo was an even more unlikely presence in Cornwall than Hepworth and Nicholson. ibid.
A wave of young artists now poured into St Ives. ibid.
The Festival of Britain was a blueprint for the world of tomorrow. And the nation’s artists were all asked to contribute. None however had quite the impact of Barbara’s monumental work Contrapunctal Forms. ibid.
11,441. He [Ben] was insanely jealous. Spurred on by this the 1950s became a prolific period for Ben too. He exhibited around the world. His work was snapped up by the best museums. And he won virtually every international prize going. Critics even dubbed him the British Picasso. ibid.
The break with Ben was the most traumatic event in Barbara’s life. ibid.
Their particular genius was for sculpture. From the fifteenth century the Maori began constructing large permanent households often adorned with elaborate carvings. James Fox, Oceans Apart: Art and the Pacific s1e3: New Zealand, BBC 2018
All around the meeting house are wall panels called poupou that depict ancestral history and myth. ibid.
A shark – a big fish – in a tank of formaldehyde; how does it become a work of art? Brian Sewell
The working-class boy from Leeds who made himself the richest living artist in the world today. Janet Street-Porter, The Genius of British Art: Modern Times, 2010
Hirst’s first masterpiece – A Thousand Years: a glass case filled with flies and maggots feeding off a cow’s severed head. ibid.
It’s amazing what you can do with an E in A-level art, a twisted imagination and a chainsaw. Damien Hirst, accepting Turner Prize