Abstraction Matters

Book excerpt: From the archaic funerary and sacred stones to the most recent three-dimensional objects, sculpture has been determined by a dualistic tension between the urge for imitation of natural forms (mimesis) and the desire to freely shape autonomous configurations (abstraction). Within such a complex history, the second half of the 20th century has been a particularly intense period. Besides their abstract works, many sculptors developed an extraordinarily rich theoretical discourse. This collection of essays presents some of the most eminent protagonists of this crucial historical moment by focusing on the artists’ “own words”. In their analysis, the contributors have followed three key-notions – “Sensation”, “Idea”, and “Language” – that fruitfully collect different artists under a common conceptual arch and show the aesthetic relevance of abstraction in sculpture. This book addresses high-level undergraduate and graduate students, as well as the scholarly community in the fields of aesthetics and art criticism, art history and art theory, visual, cultural and media studies.