Top 125 Sculpture Quotes

I really became convinced I wanted to tell the story of the real-life model for the Degas sculpture ‘Little Dancer Aged 14,’ which was unveiled in 1881, the Belle Epoque.

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

‘6 Times’ is an attempt to reinvestigate the social responsibility of sculpture. The body in question is a particular body, but it doesn’t really matter whose it is.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Moonlight is sculpture.

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.

Sculpture is the best comment that a painter can make on painting.

You have to create your life. You have to carve it, like a sculpture.

I created a successful outdoor youth festival – the Liverd festival – against all good advice. It was a great way to explore and investigate social sculptures. Having that as my kind of studio, outside of a museum or precious white-cube gallery, that was a kind of education.

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.

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

I want people to get inspired by public space – their space. People tend to forget about it because they do the daily thing, but putting up these sculptures breaks the routine.

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

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.

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

Some time ago, we went to Asia and took a camera along, and I began to do what I’d done even years ago doing people. I couldn’t get interested in it. And I did hundreds of photographs of details of the monuments as sculpture.

My first impression of Beverly Hills was that it had a landscape of small houses built by famous architects, so I didn’t want to make a big block or sculpture here; I wanted to make a community rooted to the place.

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.

Unlike painting, sculpture, or music, typefaces must be useful to someone. Fortunately for designers, the digital age has produced new problems to solve – developing typefaces that work on mobile phones, for one – and enabled better solutions to old problems.

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’m in deep in everything, every moment of the day. I create the systems and oversee every aspect of the execution. Every mark on a sculpture and every brush-stroke on a painting is in a controlled situation, exactly as they’d be if I’d have done them myself.

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.

I was given a life-size iron sculpture of a heron by a godparent. It was so poorly made, that it looked more like a pterodactyl and was so unbalanced that it would continue to topple over and create huge divots in my bedroom floor with its sharp beak.

Film is like sculpture, writing, acting, technical arts, all sorts of arts. And that’s why I wanted to do it for so long, because it would include so many places for attention.

Mission accomplished. The Museum of Modern Art’s wide-open, tall-ceilinged, super-reinforced second floor was for all intents and purposes built to accommodate monumental installations and gigantic sculptures, should the need arise. It has arisen.

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.

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.

I enjoy doing digital work. I enjoy sculpting digitally. I’ve had my digital sculptures on covers of the top digital magazines.

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

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

I can actually feel the interior body of a dancer. I have the ability to capture a split second… I want you to be hit with whatever the essence is of this sculpture.

In Rome, I particularly love the history, churches, sculptures and architecture and the fact that you can walk along a tiny cobbled street and turn the corner to find the Trevi Fountain. London is evocative of other eras and full of history.

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.

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.

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.

Sculpture is the art of the intelligence.

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.

I went to Goldsmith College of Art in London in the ’80s and there I made sculptures, but the objects had nothing to do with how I was thinking. I was making beautifully sanded wooden boxes!

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

Somebody informed me recently that the key to every art, from writing to gardening to sculpture, is creativity. I beg to differ.

In my extensive experience, I can honestly say that Sculpture Hospitality’s inventory solutions are world class and, by far, the most comprehensive in the industry.

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.

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.

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 like the Alice in Wonderland sculpture in Central Park. I love how it’s been rained on forever and looks worn down by time.

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

Mushy novels, pretty pictures, pretty sculpture, decorations on the wall, nice parallel lines – make me sick.

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.

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.

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

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.

I look at every piece of furniture and every object as an individual sculpture.

I’m a classically trained painter, and I was an illustrator in New York working with Fortune 500s companies as well as the NBA and the Olympics. I first got into sculpting when I created a sculpture based on a painting I had done for the 1984 Olympics.

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.

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

I love Rauschenberg. I love that he created a turning point in visual history, that he redefined the idea of beauty, that he combined painting, sculpture, photography, and everyday life with such gall, and that he was interested in, as he put it, ‘the ability to conceive failure as progress.’

In our own time it has been seen… that simple children, roughly brought up in the wilderness, have begun to draw by themselves, impelled by their own natural genius, instructed solely by the example of these beautiful paintings and sculptures of Nature.

In Portugal, my sculpture ‘She Changes’ refers to the town’s fishing history, to the era of seafaring trade and discovery. The contemporary site is industrial, surrounded by red and white striped smokestacks, which is mirrored in the pattern of the sculpture.

Though I love the arts with all my heart – paintings, sculpture, theatre, and music – and think they are among the biggest achievements we humans can do, I am really convinced that architecture is among the most important.

Good painting is the kind that looks 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.

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.

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

Painting is so poetic, while sculpture is more logical and scientific and makes you worry about gravity.

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.

I’ve always been concerned with my sculpture. The drawings I do at night at home to relax. And for a long time, I just gave them to friends or my wife and didn’t really show them.

Music is an expression of individuality; it’s how you see the world. All art is, for that matter. You take how you experience the world, interpret it, and send it out there – express it – whether it’s sculpture, dance or singing.

A chair, it’s like a sculpture. It starts as a thought and then becomes an idea, something I might think about for years. When the time is right, I express it on paper, usually as a simple line in space. Finally, it takes shape.

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

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

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

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?

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

I hate all those celebrity sculptures like Tussauds, where everyone is dressed in spangly suits and they are all smiling.

My great-grandparents have some beautiful sculptures which have come down the generations. They are priceless and whenever I look at them, I am inspired.

My interest in art must have started with my Catholic upbringing. Art was everywhere: churches with its paintings, sculptures, stained glass, textiles, and fine metalwork.

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

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.

Sculpture occupies the same space as your body.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Sculpture is something you bump into when you back up to look at a painting.

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.

Sculptures created from found materials like ice and thorns, driftwood, and even bleached kangaroo bones all presuppose that artistic design will yield to the cycles of time and climate, whether over an hour or a decade.

I left Kurdistan in April 2003 with the peshmerga, following their excited advance as Saddam’s forces crumbled. First Kirkuk, then Mosul – where looters broke into the city museum and seized its Parthian sculptures – then Tikrit. I reported from Baghdad in month-long stints until the end of 2004.

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.

My art originates from hallucinations only I can see. I translate the hallucinations and obsessional images that plague me into sculptures and paintings.

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.

Architecture is inhabited sculpture.

It’s extremely difficult to say what one actually means by ‘sculpture’ other than, in a provisional sense, it’s something that goes on the floor or a pedestal, and loosely applies to a certain history of the use of that term.

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.

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

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.

The first piece I ever collected was a Roy Lichtenstein: a sculpture called ‘Surrealist Head II’. There was a waiting list. I remember Steve Martin wanted one, and I wanted one. I got the ‘Surrealist Head’, and I was thrilled.

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?’

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

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

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

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.

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

Art – be it painting, sculpture, music – they are all creations, they are creative acts. I consider a film, with everything that is involved in it, an 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.

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.

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

I’m showing some of my sculptures in Holland in the spring, so we’ll see.

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

Photography, sculpture, and painting were wielded as cultural weapons over the course of generations to substantiate the idea that black people were inherently subordinate beings; they were used to make slavery acceptable and to make black subjugation more palatable.

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.

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.

We do need sculpture. People always say: ‘Well, that sculpture could have paid for a cot in a maternity ward.’ But if the world had been run on those lines, there’d only be about four books, and they’d be seed-drill manuals.

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.