Sculpture makes a comeback
About the great return of sculptors to art fairs and galleries.
After the great return of painting, here comes the great return of sculpture! The February issue of Beaux Arts Magazine devotes a very playful dossier to these sculptors who have now been propelled to the forefront of the contemporary art market, offering us a small, non-exhaustive selection of twenty-four of them, divided into five major trends: the most ecological, the most mythological, the most protesting, the most extraterrestrial and the most facetious. Some of them could even tick several boxes. Where we see that the new works of art for sale have marvellously reinvented the traditional statuary, in the tradition of Claes Oldenburg or Michel Blazy...
"At a time when statues are being dismantled or overturned, a manifestation of a revolt against a whole part of history, the very foundations of statuary are being shaken," writes Judicaël Lavrador in his article for Beaux Arts Magazine. "Socles, pedestals... so many intimidating elements that seem destined to disappear. For a whole generation of artists, sculpting is now akin to representing all kinds of subjects but also all those who were previously excluded or humiliated by the art of statuary. It is as if sculpture had become one of the vectors of a transfer of power. Anxious not to celebrate or consecrate, it proposes, on the contrary, to represent other people, other forms of life, other stories. Even if it means detaching itself from reality.
In the "most ecological" category, we can see to what extent sculpture and contemporary art installations are no longer intended to create a link with the spectators, but to reconnect them with nature. Ranti Bam, represented by the 50 Golborne Art Gallery in London, creates "magical boxes of sorts with a thousand promises" by modelling clay, while the artist Hélène Burtin, for example, has designed "a path studded with pottery that leads to a large tent draped with cereals", as well as being the curator and historian who contributed to the rediscovery of Valentine Schlegel (1925-2021), a sculptor who made admirable chimneys with anthropomorphic forms. The now Parisian represented by the Crèvecoeur art gallery, Anne Bourse, makes cocoons out of her exhibitions by decorating them with curtains, cushions and mattresses sewn and painted by hand. And the young artist from Montpellier, Amandine Arcelli, creates branched and aerial sculptures with materials used in the building industry.
In the "most mythological" category, the sculptures thwart the classical canons to better play with proportions or materials. "Nicolas Party's deadpan figures have big heads like at the carnival; Jean-Marie Appriou's aquatic or celestial creatures have eyes that widen while their flesh shrivels; Zohreh Zavareh's flat dog lies down, devoid in its latex body," observes the journalist. "This little deformed people are the heralds of a new grotesque that rubs off, through its truculence and its sometimes monstrous weirdness, on the austere white cubes of the exhibition galleries. But there is something else. These works of art are intriguing because of their mystery and their narrative charge (...) They do not ignore ancient myths, tales and obscure legends, drawn from a wide range of civilizations, without depriving themselves of interweaving these sources of inspiration. Thus Stefan Rinck, represented by the Semiose art gallery in Paris, uses direct stone cutting to create a bestiary with mythological or legendary mutations. When Tarik Kiswanson, represented by the Carlier Gebauer art gallery in Berlin and Madrid, upset the world order at the Guimet museum during the last Lyon biennial, by attaching old desks found on the spot to the ceiling and hanging white forms like cocoons or bulbs, to speak of uprooting, memory and fragility.
In the 'most assertive' category, contemporary artists seem to be on a mission to bring invisibilities back into the mainstream. The artworks for sale by Huma Bhabha, a Pakistani artist represented in Los Angeles and New York by the David Kordansky art gallery, are a kind of neo-pop totems, as intimidating in their corpulence as they are subtle in their painted surface and composite workmanship. Simone Leigh, who won the Golden Lion at the last Venice Biennale and is represented in New York and Los Angeles by the Matthew Marks Art Gallery, covered the roof of the American pavilion with raffia to erect her haughty sculptures of black women. And the sculptures of emaciated giants by Thomas Houseago, represented by the galleries Xavier Hufkens (Brussels) and Gagosian (New York-London-Paris), speak powerfully of strength and fragility. As for the graphic sculptures of Daniel Otero-Torres, represented in Paris by the art gallery Mor Charpentier, they are much more serious than they appear, so much so that the dimension of historical reconstitution is present in the stagings of the Colombian artist who works from social, ecological and political events that have marked Latin America.
In the "most alien" category, the sculptures of Renaud Jerez, represented by the Crèvecoeur art gallery in Paris, play with their chromatic audacity to place their mutant bodies in a futuristic halo. Those of Mire Lee, the Korean artist represented by the Tina Kim art gallery in New York, are made of steel, silicone, plaster and plastic to better deliver an image of the complex piping of the physiognomy of the living. Like Andra Ursuta's blown glass sculptures, they caused a sensation at the last Venice Biennale, while Bojan Sarcevic's mineral mannequins freeze their narrative power with ice cubes, and the hybrid giants of the young Hugo Servanin will be on display from 17 March to 7 May in the Magasins Généraux in Pantin.
Finally, in the "most facetious" category, we think of Marcel Broodthaers' Casserole de moules fermées (Casserole of closed mussels), so much so that visual artists make contemporary vanities out of all the objects at their disposal. For example, Gavin Turk's upsetting sleeping bag, Mungo Thomson's bluffing painted bronze giving the illusion of a pile of cardboard boxes, Tony Matelli's moving hyper-realistic dandelion, or Francesco Gennari's poetic orange peels. And what can we say about Julian Charrière's sculptures and videos depicting the catastrophes caused by man in the Anthropocene era, except to go and see them in the exhibition "Les portes du possible - Art & science-fiction" which is being held at the Centre Pompidou-Metz until 10 April.