Top 105 Sculpture Quotes

I came from an intellectual Parisian family. My father was a watchmaker; my mother was a housewife. We discussed politics, art, sculpture – never fashion.

I really don’t have a theme when I start a sculpture. The rock guides me to the final sculpture. I think that is true for many creative sculpture artists.

Sculptures created from found materials like ice and thorns, driftwood, and even bleached kangaroo bones all presuppose that artistic design will yield to the cycles of time and climate, whether over an hour or a decade.

I paint – I tend more to abstraction – but not as much as I would like to because of time. I would love to do sculpture – I’ve toyed with the idea of fitting in a sculpture course.

There are two kinds of sculptures. There’s the kind that subtracts: Michelangelo starts with a block of marble and chips away. And then there is the kind that adds, building with clay, piling it on. The way I write novels is to keep piling on and piling on and piling on.

It’s not like since I make comics I only read comics and since I make movies I will only go out and watch movies. Any kind of artistic expression interests me; it goes from literature to music to sculpture, painting; whatever is extremely inspiring for me becomes a reference also for me.

I got so I was really just sick of sculpture.

That is the effect of my sculptures in the public domain: people are making contact with each other again.

I started doing sculpture rather than painting. I was halfway through my degree, and I hadn’t really done any introduction courses in sculpture… I’d missed all the technical stuff. I didn’t really know how to weld or forge or carve or model. I’d sort of evaded all those technique classes, so I had no technique.

A piece of sculpture has to be more than a block of wood.

Sculpture and seams are like boxers and broken noses: They go hand in hand.

The impulse for me to want to make sculpture is because I want to make statements, really, on a purely emotional level. And it’s also somewhat of a challenge to see how that can be done with materials and objects that really are not emotional, in and of themselves.

Firstly I did it in this huge theatre in Avignon, then to smaller places, then bigger places. You have to change the volume of the voice, give more or less. The way you have to relate to space makes it like sculpture.

From playwrights I had never heard of and performance forms I had never seen to sculpture and painting, I gained immense experience as an actor in National School of Drama (NSD). I discovered what discipline and good taste in the theatre means.

In my extensive experience, I can honestly say that Sculpture Hospitality‘s inventory solutions are world class and, by far, the most comprehensive in the industry.

The ostensible subject of my photographs may be motion, but the subtext is time. A dancer‘s movements illustrate the passage of time, giving it a substance, materiality, and space. In my photographs, time is stopped, a split second becomes an eternity, and an ephemeral moment is solid as sculpture.

I have tried to get close to the frontier between architecture and sculpture and to understand architecture as an art.

All my life as an artist I have asked myself: What pushes me continually to make sculpture? I have found the answer. art is an action against death. It is a denial of death.

Together let us desire, conceive, and create the new structure of the future, which will embrace architecture and sculpture and painting in one unity and which will one day rise toward Heaven from the hands of a million workers like the crystal symbol of a new faith.

Lou Tyrrell has created a theatre that is a safe haven for playwrights, a birthing center for new American writing. Arts Garage has created a vital, enthusiastic audience for theatre, music, painting and sculpture in Delray Beach.

The art of mastering life is the prerequisite for all further forms of expression, whether they are paintings, sculptures, tragedies, or musical compositions.

There is one way that architecture is superior to sculpture, and that is scale. You can walk into a building and have it all around you.

I’m in deep in everything, every moment of the day. I create the systems and oversee every aspect of the execution. Every mark on a sculpture and every brush-stroke on a painting is in a controlled situation, exactly as they’d be if I’d have done them myself.

If you look at sculptures from hundreds of years ago, everyone‘s naked. It’s not a bad thing.

I am finally getting the chance to build large structures and break preconceptions that my designs are just sculptures for people to be in. But my work always comes down to the human scale.

Nobody complains that Bernini’s sculptures are too darn real, right? Or that Norman Rockwell’s paintings are too creepy. Well, robots can seem real and be loved, too. We’re trying to make a new art medium out of robotics.

How do you make the timelessness of inert, silent objects count for something? How to use the, in a way, dumbness of sculpture in a way that acts on us as living things?

Writing for me is quite a plastic form, a kind of mental sculpture, although that sounds weird. It acquires its character and its depth as it goes along.

I have the deepest admiration for Angela Palmer and her work so having my helmet as her subject has been a true honour for me. I think the sculpture is stunning and very striking, it’s the most incredible combination of strength with fragility.

Parks are works of art just as a painting or sculpture is.

I always think that in some way, art is the best tool we have to prepare for death. It’s like a sculpture that you can interpret differently every time you look at it.

I’ll bet there are a lot of artists that nobody hears about who just make more money than anybody. The people that do all the sculptures and paintings for big building construction. We never hear about them, but they make more money than anybody.

Monarchs, aristocrats, and other powerful and wealthy individuals have usually been happy to have themselves and their possessions and families immortalised in oil paintings and sculpture. But before the 20th century, such dynasts rarely commissioned artworks that set out to represent society as a whole.

I love reality TV and everything, and it’s something that I truly love to do, and I love the outcome of it; it’s like my art. I consider my reality show as my art piece, and it’s like a sculpture that I built; it’s my baby.

Why must art be static? You look at an abstraction, sculptured or painted, an entirely exciting arrangement of planes, spheres, nuclei, entirely without meaning. It would be perfect, but it is always still. The next step in sculpture is motion.

Somebody informed me recently that the key to every art, from writing to gardening to sculpture, is creativity. I beg to differ.

I have no conceit as a writer; in fact, I find it very difficult to start writing about sculpture generally & my aims in particular.

‘Spring One’ probably has only four bars of Vivaldi in it, but it feels like it’s all Vivaldi. It’s odd. It’s a bit like walking around a sculpture, you just sort of see it from a different angle.

Art works because it appeals to certain faculties of the mind. Music depends on details of the auditory system, painting and sculpture on the visual system. Poetry and literature depend on language.

What makes Burning Man special is the location: a 9-mile circle of gypsum, an ancient dried ocean bed. The ground is like a flat crust with no plants or insects, a perfect outdoor gallery for monumental interactive sculpture and architecture.

I made all sorts of things: drawings, sculptures – I was doing origami before I even knew the word. I was constantly creating.

Talent grips us. We are overtaken by the beauty of Michelangelo’s sculpture, riveted by Mariah Carey’s angelic voice, doubled over in laughter by the comedy of Robin Williams, and captivated by the on screen performances of Denzel Washington.

There is something that always will be true about painting and sculpture – that in order to really get it, you have to show up. That is something that is both sad and kind of beautiful about it. It remains analog. It remains special and irreducible.

I started doing sculpture in 1959. I had no commissions then. They were painted, similar in style to the paintings… At a certain point, I decided I didn’t want an edge between two colors, I wanted color differences in literal space.

Work is rich. It can be looked at psychologically or philosophically or personally. The interpretive nature of work is different than the work itself. The interpretation of work isn’t the key to understanding it. I’m worried about making a good sculpture. I’m not so worried about the interpretation of it.

I went to Goldsmith College of Art in London in the ’80s and there I made sculptures, but the objects had nothing to do with how I was thinking. I was making beautifully sanded wooden boxes!

Writing, film, sculpture, music: it’s all make-believe, really.

I had a natural feeling for sculpture, and the nudes are my sculpture.

Music, in performance, is a type of sculpture. The air in the performance is sculpted into something.

The architect who first inspired me to follow this profession was Sir John Soane and his Regency home; well, his three homes, now a museum. The place is like an encyclopedia of paintings, antiquities, furniture, sculptures, and drawings.

Every other piece of industrial design is a pot or a dish or something insignificant. But when you have a chair, it’s like a sculpture of a person: it’s alive. It’s big. You can’t miss it. It’s a ‘look at me!’ item.

My art originates from hallucinations only I can see. I translate the hallucinations and obsessional images that plague me into sculptures and paintings.

I try to consider each body of work on its own terms, discretely, so terms like ‘sculpture’ or ‘photography‘, in their broad sense, don’t really enter into my thinking.

The question I ask myself when adapting a book is how do I be true to the spirit and soul of the character? How would I describe this character in my medium? If you asked one person to do a painting of something and another to create a sculpture of it, you’ll never ask, ‘Why doesn’t the painting look like the sculpture?’

Sculpture is something you bump into when you back up to look at a painting.

I’ve noticed a lot of younger artists have less fear of doing different sorts of things, whether it’s various types of music, or gallery artists moving between video and sculpture and drawing.

They are more beautiful than anything in the world, kinetic sculptures, perfect form in motion.

I love Rauschenberg. I love that he created a turning point in visual history, that he redefined the idea of beauty, that he combined painting, sculpture, photography, and everyday life with such gall, and that he was interested in, as he put it, ‘the ability to conceive failure as progress.’

Turns out it’s bloody hard to make a sculpture that looks like a human head, so I’ve not bothered. Realism is for squares.

I really became convinced I wanted to tell the story of the real-life model for the Degas sculpture ‘Little Dancer Aged 14,’ which was unveiled in 1881, the Belle Epoque.

I believe people can have a profound experience by being surrounded by something beautiful – that’s what I aim for. My sculpture is about the way you feel when you’re standing under it and inside it. It’s experiential art.

I have been taking every step toward the future every day through making many paintings and sculptures with my deep emotion hidden in my life.

Many of my sculptures take a long time to make.

I’m a very positive person, but this whole concept of having to always be nice, always smiling, always happy, that’s not real. It was like I was wearing a mask. I was becoming this perfectly chiselled sculpture, and that was bad. That took a long time to understand.

We used to make patterns in the dirt, hanging our feet off the horse-drawn farm equipment. We made endless hourglass figures that I now see as the forms within forms in my crocheted wire sculptures.

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.

The first piece I ever collected was a Roy Lichtenstein: a sculpture called ‘Surrealist Head II’. There was a waiting list. I remember Steve Martin wanted one, and I wanted one. I got the ‘Surrealist Head’, and I was thrilled.

Painting, sculpture and architecture are finished, but the art habit continues.

Ron Mueck’s ‘Dead Dad’ was fantastic. It was an almost exact replica of his dead dad’s body, shrunk to be a third of the size, a very powerful sculpture.

A chair, it’s like a sculpture. It starts as a thought and then becomes an idea, something I might think about for years. When the time is right, I express it on paper, usually as a simple line in space. Finally, it takes shape.

Sculpture is the best comment that a painter can make on painting.

I really have to think of myself as a painter first because sculpture came much, much later. As a student at the Art Institute in Chicago, I simply never became involved in sculpture. I did prints, and I did paintings.

Drawings, paintings, and sculptures. That’s the three pillars of art academia.

I hate all those celebrity sculptures like Tussauds, where everyone is dressed in spangly suits and they are all smiling.

Picasso‘s sculpture has incredible strength combined with a lack of pomposity.

Chairs are like sculpture.

Art – be it painting, sculpture, music – they are all creations, they are creative acts. I consider a film, with everything that is involved in it, an art.

You can’t copyright a urinal. But you could probably copyright a sculpture of a urinal. And like Duchamp’s famous work, code is both, at the same time.

Sculpture is made with two instruments and some supports and pretty air.

Until film is just as easily accessible as a pen or pencil, then it’s not completely an art form. In painting, you can just pick up a piece of chalk, a stick, or whatever. In sculpture, you can get a rock. Writing, you just need a pencil and paper. Film has been a very elitist medium. It costs so much money.

I want people to get inspired by public space – their space. People tend to forget about it because they do the daily thing, but putting up these sculptures breaks the routine.

I’ve always been concerned with my sculpture. The drawings I do at night at home to relax. And for a long time, I just gave them to friends or my wife and didn’t really show them.

My sculpture is very personal; for years my subjects were family and close, close friends.

I tried to use the questions and answers as an armature on which to build a sculpture of genuine conversation.

I was looking to explore the theme of good and evil, so what better inspiration than the comics? I’d developed a relationship with DC and Warner Bros. when I donated a sculpture of Catwoman to the ‘We Can Be Heroes‘ campaign a few years ago. That’s what started it.

The nearest approach I have ever seen to the symmetry of ancient sculpture was among the Arab tribes of Ethiopia. Our Saxon race can supply the athlete, but not the Apollo.

Sometimes in a sculpture, it’s interesting to me what’s stylized and what’s natural and how those forms interrelate, as they interrelate in ourselves.

I learned about Chinese ceramics and African sculptures, I aired my scanty knowledge of the French Impressionists, and I prospered.

Sculpture will last a lot longer than painting.

I left Kurdistan in April 2003 with the peshmerga, following their excited advance as Saddam‘s forces crumbled. First Kirkuk, then Mosul – where looters broke into the city museum and seized its Parthian sculptures – then Tikrit. I reported from Baghdad in month-long stints until the end of 2004.

The relationship between art and a job is not quite linear, but I really love any and all manifestations of art, really respect any kind of artistic impulse, whether it’s paintings and sculptures or really good filmmaking or music. I really see the relationships between these different mediums as very fluid.

Every model is a living sculpture – art in-vivo.

Since the Gothic, European sculpture has 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 to make us once more shape-conscious.

If I wanted to have total control and be a dictator, I would do ice sculpture in my basement. If I want to make a movie, I’m going to work with 500 people, and I will have to work with their strength and their weakness.

Some psychiatrist told me I was interested in sculpture because I dealt in flat surfaces and needed something with dimension.

One project I am pretty excited about is ‘Autonomy Cube.’ These are basically minimalist sculptures that create a free and open Wi-Fi network wherever you install them, and they are routed over Tor, which basically anonymizes the traffic of everybody using it.

So, in other words, how you respond to a sculpture, how a viewer sees the sculpture, is vital.

The arts community is generally dominated by liberals because if you are concerned mainly with painting or sculpture, you don’t have time to study how the world works. And if you have no understanding of economics, strategy, history and politics, then naturally you would be a liberal.

Architecture is inhabited sculpture.

In Rome, I particularly love the history, churches, sculptures and architecture and the fact that you can walk along a tiny cobbled street and turn the corner to find the Trevi Fountain. London is evocative of other eras and full of history.

In the time between records, I always have lots of stuff going on. I shoot photography, make little sculptures, play video games.

The size thing is not some gimmick or attention-getting trick but a genuine undercurrent of the work. Frank Gehry for instance likes to imagine his buildings as sculptures. I like to imagine my sculptures as architectural.

Even though the museums guarding their precious property fence everything off, in my own studio, I made them so you and I could walk in and around, and among these sculptures.

Appropriation is the idea that ate the art world. Go to any Chelsea gallery or international biennial and you’ll find it. It’s there in paintings of photographs, photographs of advertising, sculpture with ready-made objects, videos using already-existing film.

I gravitate toward contemporary art. I love great paintings, sculpture, photography, some video art.