The Object Sculpture

While sculpture was arguably easy to define when the Institute was initially set up, it continues to evolve and break free from previous meanings. Taking this as a starting point, three contemporary artists, each with a very different conception of what ‘sculpture’ can be, were invited to curate The Object Sculpture together.

Tobias Rehberger (b.1966, based Frankfurt) makes work which addresses systems of production and translation, often intervening in or exchanging different systems across time and place.

Joëlle Tuerlinckx (b.1958, based Brussels) works both intuitively and conceptually, interested in how and where we experience a ‘sculptural’ feeling, inside or outside ourselves. She often works with paper, text, film, light and colour.

Keith Wilson (b.1965, based London) is more of a studio-based artist than the other two; more material, more ‘hands-on’. Embedded in a more conventional history of ‘sculpture’, his work also has an ability to ask itself questions in a humorous way.

These artists have been invited to select works, which for them, help to define sculpture as it is now. The artists have put forward particular pieces which continue to exercise a fascination for them, even if they were first encountered years ago, when the work was already ‘historic’.

The Object Sculpture includes works from Europe and the United States – largely dating from the last forty years, but on occasion reaching back into the 19th century – all of which meet the criteria of still being ‘new’.

The artists had numerous meetings over the year leading up to the exhibitions launch to gradually establish what the question means for them personally, and to the other artists. The choice is thus simultaneously personal and consensual.

This approach has resulted in a selection which is as much a series of questions, as a series of answers. It examines the construction and operation of the word in reality, and in the imagination. The very fact that three such different artists could agree on a core group of works is a kind of answer in itself.