Search results for ""author penelope curtis""
MACK The Pliable Plane: The Wall as Surface in Sculpture and Architecture, 1945-75
In 'The Pliable Plane', curator and historian Penelope Curtis traces the ways sculpture infiltrated architectural thought over the post-war period. Her study identifies the wall as a particular locus of creative thinking - a surface which produces both continuity and separation, and which similarly unites and distinguishes the two disciplines. Surveying a series of walls - carved, cast, applied, imagined, and even conceptual - in such places as bomb shelters, caves, war memorials, and public buildings, Curtis introduces a cast of renowned and lesser-known practitioners who defined the three-dimensional conception of the years 1945 to 1970. With close readings of the work and lives of Henry Moore, Anni Albers, Frederick Kiesler, Jorge Oteiza, and Mary Martin, among others, Curtis's fluid and perspicacious history encompasses the developments of wartime production, the discovery of the Lascaux Caves, and the rise of relief art. Turning away from familiar pairings and dichotomies, it considers spaces and surfaces of coalescence and influence. Curtis compels us to understand the wall as support as much as partition, arguing for the centrality of this very pliability to the entwined development of both sculpture and architecture.
£28.78
Ridinghouse Patio and Pavilion: The Place of Sculpture in Modern Architecture
This volume examines the relationship between modern sculpture and architecture in the mid-twentieth century, an interplay that has laid the ground for the semisculptural or semiarchitectural works by architects such as Frank Gehry and artists such as Dan Graham. The first half of the book explores how the addition of sculpture enhanced several architectural projects, including Mies van der Rohe's Barcelona Pavilion (1929) and Eliel Saarinen's Cranbrook Campus (1934). The second half of the book uses several additional case studies, including Philip Johnson's sculpture court for New York's Museum of Modern Art (1953), to explore what architectural spaces can add to the sculpture they are designed to contain. The author argues that it was in the middle of the twentieth century – before sculptural and architectural forms began to converge – that the complementary nature of the two practices began clearly to emerge: figurative sculpture highlighting the modernist architectural experience, and the abstract qualities of that architecture imparting to sculpture a heightened role.
£17.95
Ridinghouse Eliseo Mattiacci: Sculpture in Action in Rome
Eliseo Mattiacci: Sculpture in Action in Rome is a fresh examination of the developments in Mattiacci’s sculpture from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s, dates that embrace the two decades he spent living and working in Italy's vibrant capital. New research by the contributors to this book reveal how the exceptional constellation of studios, galleries and institutional spaces as well as the architectural and landscape settings Rome offered were the crucial factor in Mattiacci's rapid sophistication as an artist. In the mid-1960s the city was already a major centre for art, literature, theatre and cinema, and the setting for numerous avant-garde performative 'actions' and 'happenings'. The Piazza del Popolo district was crowded with bars and galleries, and Mattiacci soon became warmly acquainted with various gallerists and artists, including the Arte Povera practitioners Jannis Kounellis and Pino Pascali. In this challenging and competitive environment Mattiacci sought to establish his own distinctive exploratory style, investigating materials, forms, sounds, presentations and actions in endlessly novel and inventive ways. The extraordinary Tubo, the long flexible yellow coil of metallic tubing that could be endlessly rearranged and even carried out of a gallery into the streets by files of admirers, was first exhibited in 1967, and made his name. The following year he staged Lavori in corso, a trio of very popular performances, in the Circo Massimo, which involved spinning huge umbrellas in imitation of the Earth's rotations and revolutions. Percorso, in 1969, was Mattiacci again in action, this time driving a noisy roadroller into and around a gallery. In the 1970s – a difficult decade of political violence in Italy – Mattiacci continued to explore both outwardly and inwardly. He was increasingly fascinated by archaeology, antique alphabets and non-literate cultures, notably the USA's First Peoples, and he created actions and presentations that ranged from exhibitions of x-rays of his own inner organs to appearances encased in 'bandaging' and plaster. In 1981 he first showed the admired Roma, a collection of 50 large sinuous metal shapes inspired by the volutes of classical and Baroque architecture, once again an artwork that is endlessly rearrangeable, indoors or out. Sculpture in Action is the beautifully illustrated account of Mattiacci's artistic creativity in those decades.
£31.50