Top 101 Sculpture Quotes

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

It wasn’t stone. It wasn’t welded steel. It wasn’t traditional sculpture. They thought it was craft, or something else, but not art. They couldn’t define it in the early Fifties when I was starting out.

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.

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

Choose paintings, sculptures, realistic or abstract or animal images woven into fabrics, rather than a faux zebra rug or a sullied Lion’s head on the wall.

What sculpture is to a block of marble, education is to the soul.

A sculpture is just a painting cut out and stood up somewhere.

My sculptures cause an uproar, astonishment, and put a smile on your face.

At a certain point, I just put the building and the art impulse together. I decided that building was a legitimate way to make sculpture.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

The thing I love about car design is that it’s sculpture everybody appreciates, everybody has access to.

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

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.

The paintings to me are always canvas; sculpture has always been metal, though I have made sculpture in wood, also.

The Bauhaus strives to bring together all creative effort into one whole, to reunify all the disciplines of practical art – sculpture, painting, handicrafts, and crafts – as inseparable components of a new architecture.

I’m putting my consciousness towards trying to teach people through pictures and sculptures that there’s something better in the world. That’s what the world needs more of.

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

I’m sick of the foodies who need every morsel that goes into their mouth to be a Picasso painting, a Giacometti sculpture, a Proust novel, evoking the world with each crumb.

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.

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

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.

But I don’t think that sculpture belongs in everyday life like a table does, or like a chair.

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.

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.

Well, what I’m doing is really clothing. I’m not doing sculpture.

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.

One never wants to do anything that’s going to break that ‘sculpture of the character‘ that’s been done so far, or make anything that’s been done so far become illogical in any way, so you always want to try to connect when you’re doing a series of films that has a continuous character.

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.

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.

I’m amazed by how angry people get about new art, particularly new sculptures in their town. The people who hate new sculpture usually find their type of art on birthday cards, pictures of a vintage car going round a hairpin bend and suchlike.

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.

Sculpture occupies the same space as your body.

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.

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

‘Lemonade‘ is made out of bubbling, fizzing, popping, and ‘Hard’ is made from metal and latex – they are sort of sculptures in this way. I synthesize all sounds except for vocals using raw waveforms and different synthesis methods as opposed to using samples.

That’s why I ended up going to Lancaster University, because they had a visual arts course, and in the first year it was like a broad visual arts course in sculpture, painting, graphics – all of that.

You wouldn’t ask Rodin to make an ugly sculpture, or me to make a film with an ugly woman.

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.

I’m quite sure that all true professional artists, of every description, in all walks of life, whether their craft is painting, music, sculpture, medicine or anything, have one primary concern – mankind.

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.

I love my sculptures, and I was lucky I had them for 50 years because no one would look at them, and I really liked having them around.

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.

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?’

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.

We say to the British government: you have kept those sculptures for almost two centuries. You have cared for them as well as you could, for which we thank you. But now in the name of fairness and morality, please give them back.

Painting and sculpture are very archaic forms. It’s the only thing left in our industrial society where an individual alone can make something with not just his own hands, but brains, imagination, heart maybe.

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.

Boat building is intellectual – everything has a reason. In sculpture, it has a direction.

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 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.

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

Shape and color are my two strong things. And by doing this, drawing plants has always led me into my paintings and my sculptures.

I never studied sculpture, engineering or architecture. In fact, after college I applied to seven art schools and was rejected by all seven.

When you are chiselling a sculpture, it won‘t happen in one day, it happens over a period of time. It’s the same way that my personality has changed over the past 15 years. I am not the same person I used to be and my life experiences are what have made me.

The world of sculpture precedes by many years the world of architecture.

I am not a performer but occasionally I deliberately work in a public context. Some sculptures need the movement of people around them to work.

Sculpture will last a lot longer than painting.

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.

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 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.

The way that light hits objects, I think, is one of the more important things that sculpture and photography share.

‘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.

Sculpture is an art of the open air. Daylight, sunlight, is necessary to it, and for me, its best setting and complement is nature.

Sculpture is like farming. If you just keep at it, you can get quite a lot done.

Cars are the sculptures of our everyday lives.

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.

Oratory is the masterful art. Poetry, painting, music, sculpture, architecture please, thrill, inspire – but oratory rules. The orator dominates those who hear him, convinces their reason, controls their judgment, compels their action. For the time being, he is master.

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.

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

For most Americans, poetry plays no role in their everyday lives. But also for most Americans, contemporary painting or jazz or sculpture play no role either. I’m not saying poetry is singled out as a special thing to ignore.

It’s hard for people to understand editing, I think. It’s absolutely like sculpture. You get a big lump of clay, and you have to form it – this raw, unedited, very long footage.

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.

A well-designed home has to be very comfortable. I can’t stand the aesthetes, the minimal thing. I can’t live that way. My home has to be filled with stuff – mostly paintings, sculpture, my fish lamps, cardboard furniture, lots of books.

The thing with sculpture is, 90% of the time, when I pass a piece of sculpture, it’s in public or somewhere, and it’s just, how inconvenient that that’s there. It takes up so much room, and it’s so oppressive.

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

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.

Novel writing, like so many things in life, is an iterative process. You come at it again and again, working at it like you would a piece of pottery or a stone sculpture, chipping away the parts that don’t make sense, smoothing over the rough edges.

The skull is nature’s sculpture.

My ideas come, wh-pheww. And I draw. Just recently, when I’m searching for ideas for paintings and sculptures, I wait for ideas, and it’s always visual.

I like to have the widest part of the car being the wheels and not the body. It gives it a more athletic look and, with the sculpture, helps make a car look sexy.

I had no intentions of going into sculpture but found that sculpture was just an extension of drawing.

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

People always say that my work is sensational or shocking but there are truly shocking things you could do, and my sculptures don’t go anywhere near that.

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.

In the 1980s, Josef Beuys planted the seed that activism could be considered as art. I am influenced by the idea of his idea of social sculpture.

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

After leaving college, I was in a show called Sculpture by Women where I was asked to talk about my history of victimisation in art, and I genuinely didn’t think I had been victimised. Although I obviously believe in a lot of the feminist aspirations, I was wary about being dragged down by the politics of it.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Architects have to become designers of eco-systems. Not just designers of beautiful facades or beautiful sculptures, but systems of economy and ecology, where we channel the flow not only of people, but also the flow of resources through our cities and buildings.

Sculpture is the art of the intelligence.