The Spider is an ode to my mother. She was my best friend. Like a spider, my mother was a weaver. My family was in the business of tapestry restoration, and my mother was in charge of the workshop. Like spiders, my mother was very clever. Spiders are friendly presences that eat mosquitoes. We know that mosquitoes spread diseases and are therefore unwanted. So, spiders are helpful and protective, just like my mother. Louise Bourgeois
American sculptor, painter and printmaker of French birth. She studied mathematics at the Sorbonne before turning to studio arts. In 1938, after marrying Robert Goldwater, an American art historian, critic and curator, she went to New York, where she enrolled in the Art Students League and studied painting for two years. Bourgeois’s work was shown at the Brooklyn Museum Print Exhibition in 1939. During World War II she worked with Joan Miró, André Masson and other European expatriates.
Although Bourgeois exhibited with the Abstract Expressionists, she never became an abstract artist. Instead, she created symbolic objects and drawings expressing themes of loneliness and conflict, frustration and vulnerability.
In 1949 Bourgeois had her first sculpture exhibition, including Woman in the Shape of a Shuttle, at the Peridot Gallery; this work proved typical of her wooden sculpture and foreshadowed her preoccupations of the following years. Her first sculptures were narrow wooden pieces, such as Sleeping Figure (1950; New York, MOMA), a ‘stick’ figure articulated into four parts with two supporting poles. Bourgeois soon began using non-traditional media, with rough works in latex and plaster contrasting with her elegantly worked pieces in wood, bronze and marble. In the 1960s and 1970s her work became more sexually explicit. The psychological origins of her work are particularly evident in Destruction of the Father (1974; New York, Xavier Fourcade). Bourgeois’s work was appreciated by a wider public in the 1970s as a result of the change in attitudes wrought by feminism and Postmodernism. Tate online
English sculptor, draughtsman and printmaker. She studied [Whiteread] painting at Brighton Polytechnic (1982–5) and sculpture at the Slade School of Fine Art (1985–7). Employing traditional casting methods and materials that are commonly used in the preparation of sculptures rather than for the finished object, such as plaster, rubber and resin, she makes sculptures of the spaces in, under and on everyday objects. Her art operates on many levels: it captures and gives materiality to the sometimes unfamiliar spaces of familiar life (bath, sink, mattress or chair), transforming the domestic into the public; it fossilises everyday objects in the absence of human usage; and it allows those objects to stand anthropomorphically for human beings themselves.
Whiteread’s choice of subject-matter reflects an awareness of the intrinsically human-scaled design of the objects with which we surround ourselves and exploits the severing of this connection, by removal of the object's function, to express absence and loss. Her early work allowed autobiographical elements. Later works move towards the expression of a universal human position, and their titles become correspondingly more prosaic. Tate online
One of the 20th century’s leading sculptors, Jacob Epstein placed portraiture at the centre of this work. This display explores his achievement and practice through busts of artists, writers, politicians and other leading figures selected from the National Portrait Gallery Collection. Epstein made portrait busts throughout his entire career. Modelled in clay and cast in bronze, these likenesses were rooted in observation but experimented with an expressive approach to form and texture to evoke the physical and psychological presence of the sitter. Ranging in date from 1916 to 1951, the works in the display include some of Epstein’s most celebrated portraits, notably his busts of Joseph Conrad, T S Eliot, Vaughan Williams and George Bernard Shaw. National Portrait Gallery online
Helen Chadwick died in 1996 at the age of forty-two. The Art of Helen Chadwick, 2004
3 Experiments With Video; Train of Thought 1979; Ego Geometria Sum 1984-1986; The Oval Court 1984-86; Carcass 1986; Mirror 1984; Blood Hyphen 1988; Viral Landscape No 5 1988-8; Meat Abstract No 8 1989; Fleshlings No 1 1989; Piss Flowers 1991-92; Cacao 1994; Nebula 1996; Moonstance 1996. ibid.
Anthony Caro (Sir Anthony Caro OM, CBE) has been a key figure in contemporary sculpture for half a century. Since his ground-breaking show at the Whitechapel London Gallery in 1963, his work has continued to move and expand in new and different directions. Anthony Caro online
British sculptor Sir Anthony Caro has died of a heart attack at the age of 89, his family has confirmed.
Sir Anthony was widely regarded as the greatest British sculptor of his generation and worked as an assistant to Henry Moore in the 1950s.
Tate director Sir Nicholas Serota called him ‘One of the outstanding sculptors of the past 50 years.’ BBC online 24th October 2013
Unquestionably the most resolved, substantial and satisfying use so far of the single idea that defines her career. David Cohen, re Rachael Whiteread’s Sensation exhibition of 1997 and Ghost 1990
A strange and fantastical object which also amounts to one of the most extraordinary and imaginative sculptures created by an English artist this century. The Independent, re Rachel Whiteread’s House 1993
Bill Turnbull: He began working in steel ... fibre glass and Perspex. Beyond Time: William Turnbull, BBC 2013
The bawdy euphemisms, repressed truths, erotic delights and sculptural possibilities of the sexual body lie at the heart of Sarah Lucas’s work (b 1962). First coming to prominence in the 1990s with a show at London’s City Racing memorably titled, Penis Nailed to a Board, this British artist’s sculpture, photography and installation have established her as one of the most important figures of her generation.
Lucas’s materials – furniture, clothing, food – are sculptural and associative. Nylon tights provide a useful casing: stuffed with wadding they become splayed limbs of female bodies. Tights are also intimate, erotic, yet cheap and disposable, both glamorous and abject. Lucas’s objects also draw on art history; her frequent use of toilet bowls recalls Duchamp’s urinal, the first ready-made.
Stained mattresses, sofas and chairs act as plinths for ‘bodies’ sometimes situated against the surreal domesticity of Lucas’s wallpapers. Her figures are all headless. There is only one face, that of the artist herself, omnipresent through a sequence of self-portraits. Whitechapel Gallery online
It is surprising to find someone whose most well-known work is so urban – kebabs, fried eggs, dirty public toilets, grimy, paint-splattered walls, burned-out cars; so saturated with the sense of the London she grew up in – tucked away down a long country lane, behind a Baptist church in Suffolk. Even the local cab drivers seem to have a hard time finding the house, and so Sarah Lucas waits outside in the sunshine, barefoot, in a torn blue dress, dust caught in her unbrushed hair. The Guardian online article 27th May 2011 Aida Edemariam
There are a lot of penises in Sarah Lucas’s Whitechapel exhibition. Big dicks, little fag-end dicks and absolutely humongous members. Lucas is also something of a comedian, but that is to belittle a talent that is uncomfortable, uncompromising, and much broader and richer than that of a potty-mouthed standup. Cocks, tits, fags, bums, blokes and their blokeish parts and their blokey ways are all here, along with a giant hunk of Spam and a mobile of concrete pies. Then there are the readers’ wives and human toilets. The show, visitors are advised, might not be suitable for children. The real problem is for adults, who might have to answer all the little blighters' questions ...
Lucas’s Whitechapel show is both enormously enjoyable and awful: awful because much of what she shows us about our relationship to the human body and our psyches is as grim as it is hilarious – the toilet as an extension of the human digestive tract, as receptacle not just of waste but of parts of ourselves, dark thoughts as well as dark matter. She can bring us up short: a cigar and a couple of walnuts are balanced on the rim of a begrimed loo. I imagine the smell of the cigar and the taste of walnuts. It’s stomach-churning. The Guardian online article 30th September 2013 Adrian Searle
Sculpture in stone should look honestly like stone … to make it look like flesh and blood, hair and dimples, is coming down to the level of the stage conjurer. Henry Moore
Sculpture is the best comment that a painter can make on painting. Pablo Picasso
Sculpture is the art of the intelligence. Pablo Picasso
Sculpture is made with two instruments and some supports and pretty air. Gertrude Stein
It is not hard to understand modern art. If it hangs on a wall it’s a painting, and if you can walk around it it’s a sculpture. Tom Stoppard
All of Koons’s best art – the encased vacuum cleaners, the stainless-steel Rabbit (the late-twentieth century's signature work of Simulationist sculpture), the amazing gleaming Balloon Dog, and the cast-iron re-creation of a Civil War mortar exhibited last month at the Armory – has simultaneously flaunted extreme realism, idealism, and fantasy. Jerry Saltz
Painting is so poetic, while sculpture is more logical and scientific and makes you worry about gravity. Damien Hirst