EXPERIMENTATION MATERIALS AND MEANING Artists have always transformed

EXPERIMENTATION: MATERIALS AND MEANING Artists have always transformed materials. Materials themselves can transform meanings.

Frank Dobson (1926)

Eileen Agar 1938 Objects trouves

Mark Quinn Self (1991)

Direct Carving and ‘Truth to Materials’ Barbara Hepworth, Mother and Child (1927)

‘The beauty of sculpture is inseparable from its material’ Ezra Pound (1921) ‘Carving is interrelated masses conveying an emotion, Barbara Hepworth (1934)

Henry Moore, Reclining Figure (1936)

Found Objects Marcel Duchamp, Fountain (1917)

The phrase “Anxious Objects” comes from The Anxious Object: Art Today and Its Audience, a collection of essays by Harold Rosenberg, a prominent American art critic of the mid-20 th century.

Meret Oppenheim, Luncheon in Fur (1936)

Picasso complements the young artist on her fur bracelet, and flirtatiously observes that there are many things he enjoys that were improved when covered in fur. Oppenheim responded, tongue in cheek, by asking, "Even this cup and saucer? "

Meret Oppenheim, The Couple (1956)

Picasso, Baboon and Young (1951) Bull’s Head (1942)

Nouveau Réalisme • Arman • Yves Klein • Daniel Spoerri • Piero Manzoni

Arman, Madison Avenue (1962)

Arman, Bluebeards Wife (1969)

Arman, Homage to Yves Klein

Klein, Fire Painting (1961)

Cai Guo-Qiang, Exploding House: Project for Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin, Gunpowder Drawing (2006)

“And the gold, it was something! These leaves that literally fluttered with the least current of air on the flat cushion that one held in one hand, while the other hand caught them in the wind with a knife…. What a material! The illumination of matter in its deep physical quality, I came to embrace it during that year at the ‘Savage’ frame shop. ” – Yves Klein

Susan Hiller, The Freud Museum (1991 -6)

Piero Manzoni (1933 – 1963)

Oldenburg is famous for taking everyday objects and magnifying them to colossal sizes, creating soft objects to resemble normally solid materials, or creating rigid sculpture to resemble normally soft items.

Fries (1965)

Soft Basin (1966) Soft Drain Pipe (1965? )

William Woodrow, Twin Tub with Guitar (1981)

David Mach, Polaris (1983)

Marc Quinn, No Visible Means of Escape (1996)

Marc Quinn, You Take My Breath Away (1992)

Marc Quinn, The Morphology of Specifics (1996)

Mona Hatoum, No Way (1990)

Wheelchair (1999)

Tim Noble and Sue Webster, The Undesirables (2000)

Dirty White Trash (with Gulls), 1998

Sarah Lucas (1962 - )

Two Fried Eggs and Kebab Bunny Gets Snookered

Lucas’s materials – furniture, clothing, food – are sculptural and associative. Nylon tights provide a useful casing: stuffed with wadding they become splayed limbs of female bodies. Tights are also intimate, erotic, yet cheap and disposable, both glamorous and abject. Lucas’s objects also draw on art history; her frequent use of toilet bowls recalls Duchamp’s urinal, the first ready-made.

Sarah Lucas, Au Naturel (1994)

Tracey Emin, My Bed (1998)

Anthony Gormley, Bread Works (1979 -1982)

BREAD WORKS, 1979 - 1982 BED started as a drawing. I lay on the floor and my wife drew around me. I made this silhouette into a contour map, making an approximation of the volume of my body divided into two identical halves, mirror images of each other.

Rona Pondick, Double Bed (1989)

Rachel Whiteread (b. 1963 -)