10 Contemporary Sculptors Who Are Transforming the Genre

Sculptures have been a mode of expression for centuries. Dating back to prehistorical times, sculptures have been created for a range of reasons. They have been created to serve utilitarian means, as expressions of culture and religion, for the veneration of figures, or for pure artistic expression. The three-dimensional art form has permeated cultural borders across the globe with early examples dating back to the ancient Aurignacian culture, the Neolithic Jōmon period, Chinese ritual bronzes from the Shang and Western Zhou Dynasties, and religious sculptures from the Indus Valley. Throughout the centuries, sculpture-making has been practised, developed, and refined across the world in different cultures, contexts, and continents.

In the contemporary day, sculptures remain a popular medium of choice and incorporate diverse creative processes and conceptualisations. We highlight 10 contemporary sculptors on The Artling who have created sculptures rooted in abstraction but influenced by various themes such as nature, organic forms, science, and the human condition. 
 

Vince Smith

Vince Smith is a London-born, Bath city-based artist whose work offers an alternative to the conventional plane and shape of framed paintings by bringing his sculptural wall art to the viewer's attention. He creates artworks focusing on the interaction of colours, shapes, and depth. His composition and palette choices are influenced heavily by his teenage years as a graffiti artist. The evolution of this post-graffiti genre is evident in the way that Vince carefully composes sculptures of spacial balance making use of geometric and abstract forms.  

Lilach Mileikowski

Melbourne-based ceramic artist Lilach Mileikowski’s passion lies within the manipulation of the form, challenging the limitations of the medium and its fusion with diverse materials. She presents ideas of personal, cultural, and historical significance, bringing the poetics of the past into the present to question the future. Migrating from Israel to Melbourne in 1995, Lilach completed a Diploma of Arts Ceramics followed by an Advanced Diploma of Creative Product Development, establishing her ceramics studio. In 2016 she completed a Master of Fine Art at RMIT University, her research focusing on the spiritual and political concerns of identity exploring the dual notions of fragility and strength. 

Anna Alsina Bardagí

Spanish artist Anna Alsina Bardagí is a contemporary glass sculptor based in Barcelona. Her works explore the manipulation of light, heat, and gravity through optical glass by combining glass casting techniques with optical-precision polishing. Anna's sculptures require experimental artistic techniques as well as the knowledge of physics and chemistry to gain control of the internal shapes in the glass. These internal shapes are formed during the casting process by altering the glass elements before they enter the kiln. Anna has always been fascinated by the laws of physics and the universe, and her art is driven by a desire to challenge the boundaries of gravity and dimensional spaces inside the optical glass. 

COSMOSELECTOR

COSMOSELECTOR is a young interdisciplinary and eclectic artist whose work represents a journey looking for the beauty trapped within the sedimentary geology of nature. The discovery of the unexpected has always been a powerful catalyst for human creation and improvement. To the artist, his works are fragments of distant landscapes of alien worlds; they are impossible views of something unobservable but already achievable by human imagination and desire. COSMOSELECTOR challenges the observer to act as a space explorer or natural scientist, forcing him to provide a sense and meaning to the pieces he is facing.

Jan van der Laan

For over 20 years, Jan van der Laan's art has been a unique synthesis between natural, organic forms and geometric abstraction. In his sculptures, viewers are able to recognise his quest for pure form and the desire for the almost unattainable ideal. Each of Jan's sculptures is a unique piece of art, made with craftsmanship and a love for natural stone or bronze. 

Kenta Hirai

Born in Shizuoka prefecture in 1984, Japanese sculptor Kenta Hirai moved from Takayama, Japan to Ireland and worked at the Joseph Walsh Studio for three years. After returning to Japan, he moved to Kawakami Village in Nara Prefecture, where he opened studio Jig in 2017. The same year, he received the Bronze Leaf Award at the International Furniture Design Fair Asahikawa as well as the Forestry Agency Deputy Director-General’s Japan Wood Design Award (Excellence Award). 

Laurence Elle Groux

Born in Lausanne, Switzerland and based in New York, Laurence Elle Groux is a self-taught artist working in stoneware ceramics and oil etching. She moved to the US in 1996 where she was immersed in the New York art scene. Influenced by artistic practices and design motifs found in Pre-Colombian, Byzantine, Renaissance, Art Nouveau, and Modernism, the artist's ceramic works comprise tactile, curvilinear abstract sculptures accentuated by organic shapes and patterns. Groux's work inspires visual curiosity through the generous movement of material and coalesces as tangible objects of energy and beauty.
 

Paul Stein

Paul Stein was born in  South Africa in 1956 and lives and works out of his studio in Cape Town. He works in the medium of metal and mixed media sculpture, and his works are in collections both in South Africa and abroad.

Rachel Grimshaw

British artist Rachel Grimshaw's work focuses on clay, and she is fascinated by its pliable and immediate qualities. Like a photograph capturing a 'frozen moment', clay when fired is fixed in gesture and impression. All her work is hand-made and solid, and the marks on her sculptures are created by impressing found objects. Rachel works with two separate clays: Parian porcelain and stoneware. She cuts, squeezes, and hits the clay to achieve the desired form, working instinctively and intuitively.

Paola Masi

Italian artist Paola Masi throws ceramic pieces on a kick wheel, then moulds, shapes, and often opens her works so that light can penetrate inside. She is fascinated by the container as a metaphor for the human condition, beginning with its pure form in the utilitarian sense to the sculptural and abstract. Her work thus mirrors an intuitive and intimate process: the study of form and her love of the unseen, of that which is contained in the form and transcends it. To Paola, the ceramic process becomes life's laboratory; a re-encounter with the nature of each element.

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