Sculpture Today

Contemporary sculpture is a wide-ranging and fascinating subject, surprisingly unrepresented in the current marketplace; this richly illustrated book, which follows the format of Phaidon Press' successful Art Today and Architecture Today, seeks to change this. In the great sea-change marking the end of Modernism — a general set of views and assumptions about art which reigned during the first half of the 20th century — critical opinion began to shift from painting to sculpture. Sculpture was felt to be more socially engaging because it occupied the actual space of the body rather than creating an illusionistic realm using perspective and other techniques. In the past twenty-five years sculpture has become a capacious and enormously inventive category that includes an astonishing range of phenomena. These encompass installations, environments, staged video displays and even choreographed humans. This sheer array of materials, forms and techniques that has been — and is still being — presented under the term of 'sculpture' in the 21st century indicates that the discipline is not an immutable art form with fixed boundaries and commandments, but rather that it can expand its terms of reference with unflagging energy, and is apparently inexhaustible. Sculpture Today is written in a scholarly yet accessible style, and offers a comprehensive and accessible overview of its subject, celebrating both the vitality and sheer diversity of sculpture during the last two and a half decades.