Top 130 Sculpture Quotes

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.

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 occupies real space like we do… you walk around it and relate to it almost as another person or another object.

I do a lot of work that’s permanent. The drawings, the sculptures, they’re permanent.

Whether you listen to a piece of music, or a poem, or look at a picture or a jug, or a piece of sculpture, what matters about it is not what it has in common with others of its kind, but what is singularly its own.

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.

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

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.

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.

I’ve been working in sculpture and painting since 1920.

I got so I was really just sick of sculpture.

The much-lauded visual artist Roni Horn got her Master’s in Sculpture from Yale in the Seventies, but in the course of her career she has moved, among other media, from watercolors to photographs to floor-sized installations and mats of poured gold.

Art is an expression of who you are. Parts that I play are my sculptures.

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.

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.

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’ve been making bronze sculptures for a long time. My sculptures are wholly unsuccessful and uncommercial. No one is even the remotest bit interested in them. So it’s almost like my hobby.

Don’t look for obscure formulas or mystery in my work. It is pure joy that I offer you. Look at my sculptures until you see them. Those closest to God have seen them.

I just feel like, unfortunately, I’m a person that has to be creative to live. Whether that’s, like, painting or making sculptures or writing songs, sometimes I just feel like that’s the only thing you can do.

I did photography, painting, and drawing, but I prefer sculpture. I like it because it’s very physical.

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.

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.

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.

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

In New York, I get a tremendous amount of ideas by looking at the paintings and the sculptures, adapting artistic endeavors to crafts. There is a lot of inspiration around us that we can see every day and turn into projects.

‘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.

In Giacometti’s work, the armature has once again become the life-line of the sculpture, and also, he’s brought back to sculpture a nervous sensitivity which the ‘pure carving’ side of sculpture can lose sight of altogether.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Chairs are like sculpture.

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

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.

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.

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

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?’

Moonlight is sculpture.

Clothes are unique sculptures, dependent on a supporting human form and created to move.

The skull is nature’s sculpture.

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

I would like to go to Kalimantan island in Sumatra to see the carvings and longhouse sculptures. I’ve also always wanted to look at the wood carvings along the Sepik River in New Guinea.

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’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.

They don’t send people from large corporations to hire people to make sculptures.

I didn’t do so well in the academic world, so I think the only way I could express myself was through visual art – anything I could get my hands on, whether it was glassblowing, sculpture, painting, or photography. I always wanted to be a painter. Or a farmer.

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?

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

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.

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

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

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

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.