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Category: Sculpture & Installations

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Berlinde De Bruyckere: “We Are All Flesh”

These disturbing and uncannily lifelike sculptures by Belgian artist Berlinde De Bruyckere are incredibly visceral and eerie. The repulsion instinctively triggered in the viewer comes from their verisimilitude, and the sense of reality of this nameless, grotesque, distorted, half-human, seemingly fluid flesh; combined with their beauty, the delicate, subtle mottling of colors, the pure realistic visceral “fleshiness” of the works, and their technical grace.

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Organic Forms in Extraterrestrial Life: The Art of Laurie Hassold

Laurie Hassold’s macabre, alien, and delicate sculptures are alarming and beautiful. Disturbingly sexualized, inspired by >radial symmetry, they resemble specimens or fossils in an esoteric collection of bizarre lifeforms that have arisen on other worlds, bringing to mind both Lovecraftian horrors and Ernst Haeckel‘s illustrations of sea anemones. Made with wire, clay, paint, bones, and found objects, these intricate pieces masterfully merge an impression of the organic and the alien, and evoke a sense of the terrifyingly sublime.

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Rebekah Bogard’s Fictional Animals

Rebekah Bogard’s cute, pink and white, rabbit-like ceramic sculpture creatures, arranged in installations, explore themes of gender, femininity, and sexuality. As Rebekah says in her artist statement, “I enjoy utilizing animals because they are beautiful and mysterious creatures, vulnerable to relations with humans. This susceptibility gives them a sense of benevolence that is often lacking in human associations….Some pieces look cute, sweet and innocent, but upon closer inspection, one realizes that the piece is conceptually more complicated. They may be read simultaneously as happy-go-lucky as well as melancholic and out of place. I blend the beautiful with the sad, fantasy with reality, idealism with truth as well as the sexual with the innocent.”

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Alex CF’s Mythical and Nightmare Specimens

Alex CF painstakingly creates cryptozoological specimens encased in bell jars and elaborate, gorgeous display cabinets replete with the paraphernalia, notes, and mementos of the scientific ventures that captured these exquisite specimens. He assembles complete miniature scenes around the specimens: there are reliquaries, study cases, vampire slaying kits, portable bio-aetheric animation laboratories, coffers, and sarcophagi. The specimens are drawn from literary works, including Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Dante’s Inferno, H. G. Wells’ The Island of Doctor Moreau, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, H. P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness and Chthulhu Mythos, as well as folklore and legend. The array of allusions to classical eerie fiction is delightful. He reimagines and renders these cryptic, bizarre, mythical creatures and beings, sirens, faeries, mutants, succubi, devilspawn, atrocities against nature, resulting in specimens that are disturbingly lifelike and alluringly detailed. The displays also come with beautifully drawn illustrations, which are as fascinating as the specimens themselves.

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Sarah Louise Davey’s Grotesque Menagerie

These disturbing and grotesquely beautiful sculptures by Sarah Louise Davey are made of vividly, violently, luridly, fantastically painted ceramic, embodying creatures with bold, tortured, glazed stares, and strange growths either covering their eyes or framing them like sick, rotted petals of flesh carved out around an astonishingly open iris. The effect is unnerving and startling, garish and obscene, yet whimsical and lovely. The pieces appear simultaneously textured and not, curiously both three- and two-dimensional – looking like paintings on porcelain – and the bold, dark lines sketching their features out against the chalky whiteness of the ceramic “flesh” hold a horrific and fascinating quality.

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Tim Lewis’ “Pony”

Tim Lewis’ Pony is a bizarre and uncanny kinetic sculpture that was exhibited at 2009’s Kinetica Art Fair. Unsettling and uber-realistic, Pony looks somewhat like a surreal ostrich-esque creature composed of human arms, pulling a small carriage behind itself; motion-sensitive, appearing to “walk” in a very eerie and delicately articulated fashion, it is another creepy and brilliant intersection of art and technology, and a provoking piece of interactive sculpture. Its title also suggests a veiled commentary on the relationship between humans and domesticated animals.

Tim Lewis – Pony