Top 493 Sculpture Quotes & Sayings

[I have a] way of making narrative sculpture, where first you make a text and out of that text you make objects. [...] I start with a story and then I make sculpture from that story, it's just that the stories become more and more elaborate.

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.

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

I'd been to Stourhead and was inspired by the perfect parity between architecture and art; in fact, the architecture is the art. I wrote a piece called 'Not Sculpture Park,' because most of these things become car parks for bought-in sculpture. The artists should be working with the site, not just plonking pieces down.

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.

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.

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.

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

Chairs are like sculpture.

Architecture is inhabited sculpture.

My degree was in sculpture. I always think that drawing is a sculptural process. I always feel like I'm carving the image out rather than painting the image. I'm carving it out with erasers and tools like that. I've always had this fondness for sculpture.

Once I have the finished sculpture, I’ll put it out on the street or in nature or somewhere where it interacts with the environment. Really it’s kind of the idea of turning the street into a stage and this sort of urban theater has a life of its own. If you have creative drive, and you need to manifest it, then you need some sort of medium to do that through. For me, it worked out with sculpture, and tape just is a means of doing sculpture.

Sculpture is for the touch, painting is for the eye. I wanted to make a sculpture for the eye and a painting for the touch.

Why talk about sculpture when I can photograph it?

Sculpture is the art of the intelligence.

After painting comes Sculpture, a very noble art, but one that does not in the execution require the same supreme ingenuity as the art of painting, since in two most important and difficult particulars, in foreshortening and in light and shade, for which the painter has to invent a process, sculpture is helped by nature. Moreover, Sculpture does not imitate color which the painter takes pains to attune so that the shadows accompany the lights.

We are each given a block of marble when we begin a lifetime, and the tools to shape it into sculpture. We can drag it behind us untouched, we can pound it to gravel, we can shape it into glory. Examples from every other life are left for us to see, lifeworks finished and unfinished, guiding and warning. Near the end our sculpture is nearly finished, and we can smooth and polish what we started years before. We can make our progress then, but to do it we must see past the appearances of age.

Moonlight is sculpture.

Sculpture occupies the same space as your body.

It could be that people want to consume sculpture the way they consume paintings - through photographs... I'm interested in the experience of sculpture in the place where it resides.

Edgar Degas's famous sculpture, 'Little Dancer Aged Fourteen,' served as my muse for 'The Painted Girls.' I came upon a television documentary on the work, and as someone who held the sculpture in high esteem and who largely considered ballet to be the high-minded pursuit of privileged young girls, I was struck by what I would learn.

You can't make a sculpture until you've got a lump of rock.

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

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

First of all I think of puppets as sculpture. They are sculpture that moves. You could label it any way you want, but for me it always starts in my mind as a 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?'

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

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.

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

Sculpture is an art of the open air... I would rather have a piece of my sculpture put in a landscape, almost any landscape, than in, or on, the most beautiful building I know.

Sculpture is more divine, and more like Nature, That fashions all her works in high relief, And that is Sculpture. This vast ball, the Earth, Was moulded out of clay, and baked in fire; Men, women, and all animals that breathe Are statues, and not paintings.

A second later, when he looked up at me, we were face to face, and again, even under these circumstances, I was struck by how good looking he was, in that accidental, doesn't-even-know-it kind of way. Which only made it worse. Or better. Or whatever. "Yup", he said, as if there'd been any doubt, "you're in there, all right." "I was warned, too,"I told him, as he stood up. "I just saw that sculpture, and I got distracted." "The sculpture?" He looked at it, then at me. "Oh, right. Because you know it.

With Gnaw I was thinking about traditional sculpture, about carving. I was also interested in figurative sculpture. I put those two ideas together and decided that rather than describing the body, I would use the body, my body, as a tool for making art.

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.

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

Well, I never studied design and I went to art school to study art, you know, sculpture and things like that, and ended up making things like sculpture and started making chairs and jewelry together and that's how I started.

For me, sculpture is the body. My body is my sculpture.

The skull is nature's sculpture.

That sculpture is more admirable than painting for the reason that it contains relief and painting does not is completely false. ... Rather, how much more admirable the painting must be considered, if having no relief at all, it appears to have as much as sculpture!

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

Good painting is the kind that looks like sculpture.

I got so I was really just sick of sculpture.

Man is really not freeing many aspects. He is dependent on his social circumstances, but he is free in his thinking, and here is the point of origin of sculpture. For me the formation of the thought is already sculpture. The thought is sculpture.

The viewer becomes aware of himself and of his movement through the plaza. As he moves, the sculpture changes. Contraction and expansion of the sculpture result from the viewer's movement. Step by step the perception not only of the sculpture but of the entire environment changes.

I love sculpture, and minimal sculpture is really my favorite stuff, but I wasn't very good at it, and I don't think in a three-dimensional way.

Interfacing street sculpture in public space creates an installation environment that turns regular space into art space. Signs and people and everything around a street sculpture-they all become part of it. A two-dimensional work, being confined to surfaces, doesn't have as much of a capacity.

You don't really see a muscle as a part of you, in a way. You see it as a thing. You look at it as a thing and you say well this thing has to be built a little longer, the bicep has to be longer; or the tricep has to be thicker here in the elbow area. And you look at it and it doesn't even seem to belong to you. Like a sculpture. Then after looking at it a sculptor goes in with his thing and works a little bit, and you do maybe then some extra forced reps to get this lower part out. You form it. Just like a sculpture.

Venice is all sea and sculpture.

I don't want to make plop art — sculpture that just gets plopped down in places. I wouldn't want to litter every corner of the world with my sculpture.

Sculpture is the art of the hole and the lump.

For me, architecture is an art the same as painting is an art or sculpture is an art. Yet, architecture moves a step beyond painting and sculpture because it is more than using materials. Architecture responds to functional outputs and environmental factors. Yet, fundamentally, it is important for me to stress the art in architecture to bring harmony.

If sculpture can really deal with the body, because we all inhabit ourselves, and if sculpture can really do that, which it is supposed to be able to do, and through it ask questions, philosophical questions, about being, I think these are all things we work on, all of us in our different ways, so perhaps somewhere in there, there are moments where dumb objects can speak.

I like to make sculpture because it makes my life social. When I make drawings, I work alone. When I work with sculpture I have someone I can work with.

The next step in sculpture is motion.

I really don't have a theme when I start a sculpture. The rock guides me to the final sculpture. I think that is true for many creative sculpture artists.

Everything is sculpture. Any material, any idea without hindrance born into space, I consider sculpture.

Picture and sculpture are the celebrations and festivities of form.

If you reduce sculpture to the flat plane of the photograph, you're passing on only a residue of your concerns... You're not only reducing the sculpture to a different scale for the purposes of consumption, but you're denying the real content of the work.

My drawings are the result of my sculpture.