20th-century Sculptor Quotes

Joan Miró

Max Ernst

Alberto Giacometti

Karel Appel

Antoni Tàpies

Jacques Lipchitz

Barbara Hepworth

In 1968 Ian Wilson made his final sculpture. Since then, he has explored the idea of oral communication as an art form... Wilson's work is very hard to track down, even in terms of documentation. He has been compared to the Socratic philosophers but if there is a similarity between his practice and theirs, it probably lies mainly in the fact that everything we have from that period of philosophy takes the form of secondary fragments embedded in other texts. Wilson's work functions almost like archaeological or geological evidence: it consists of objects that we examine in order to deduce, from scanty clues, what must have happened.

Edward Allington

If all creation rests upon a passion, it is for me also an act of love and an attempt to discover in myself an inner world.

Constantine Andreou

You can see the roughness of structure and the spots like wounds from battles on the canvas. The tops of skyscrapers with windows like eyes constantly remind you that there are laws surrounding the wastelands, and so you hide in the deep grass when you make love to a girl in dirty clothes, and experience how your nerves of seeing become stronger and stronger and every little sound more and more intense. That's what Pasolini's poetry is partly about; he was a street guy and therefore I avoided beautiful new wood or metal for his sculpture... The wasteland was Pasolini's other side; the boys, the knives, the nights, the tensions.

People like me, who care about printing, constitute the tiniest lunatic fringe in the nation.

I like Francis Bacon best, because Francis Bacon has terrific problems, and he knows that he is not going to solve them, but he knows also that he can escape from day to day and stay alive, and he does that because his work gives him a kick.

Louise Bourgeois

What I expect from any work of art is that it surprises me, that it violates my customary valuations of things and offers me other, unexpected ones.

Mixed feelings when he [Max Ernst frequently writes about himself in the third person] enters the forest for the first time: delight and oppression. And what the Romantics spoke of as 'being at one with Nature'. Wonderful joy in breathing freely in an open space, but also anxiety at being encircled by hostile trees. Outside and inside at the same time, free and trapped.

The great artist is conscious of the talent and power he possesses otherwise he would not see his faults and so would not be able to improve.

Henri Gaudier-Brzeska

The sculptor must search with passionate intensity for the underlying principle of the organisation of mass and tension - the meaning of gesture and the structure of rhythm.

Barbara Hepworth

Chaos can be structured as non-chaos. That we know from Jackson Pollock.

In this unexpected scenario, the UFO occupants — despite their obvious technological superiority — are desperate for both human genetic material and the ability to feel human emotions — particularly maternal emotions. Unlikely though it may seem, it is possible that the very survival of these extraterrestrials depends upon their success in absorbing chemical and psychological properties received from human abductees.

The idea of making machines that think has an unfailing fascination, not only for science fiction readers, but for all who can see it is a possible way of gaining some understanding of the working of our own minds. Thinking, however, is not an easily defined phenomenon, although it is often considered to be the process of solving problems.

Edward Ihnatowicz

The most pleasurable thing in the world, for me, is to see something and then translate how I see it.

Ellsworth Kelly

Why have our standards fallen so low? Why do we have all these ugly things which nobody needs? Industrial manufacture and new materials have led to truly unlimited possibilities of forms. There are no longer any natural constraints which depend on materials such as wood and stone. We simply manufacture everything that is technically possible and lack new structures on which to base our decisions.

I don't know if I'm making myself clear, but if I were to accept this business of conceptual art I would have no reason to exist.

Jannis Kounellis

I remember one day when Juan Gris told me about a bunch of grapes he had seen in a painting by Picasso. The next day these grapes appeared in a painting by Gris, this time in a bowl; and the day after, the bowl appeared in a painting by Picasso.

Jacques Lipchitz

Conceptual Art is a sounding instrument between printed words, luminous writings, and letters scrawled in a hasty nervous instinctive calligraphy.

I have thought a lot about the question of titles. I must confess that I find any for works that take off from an arbitrary starting point and end with something real....[Miro allowed Pierre Matisse to make titles, based on the] real things....[if they do] not evoke some tendency or other, something I want to avoid completely [very probably Miro meant here: Surrealism]. [advising Pierre Matisse; who showed then several modern European painters in New York].

Who is an artist? I say we take a title. No one gives it to us. We make our lives.

Louise Nevelson

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.

Everything is love. "HEAVEN ON EARTH" our idea of heaven has been formed by painting and nothing else. I love pure, bright colours, their intellectual clarity of expression conveying nothing but feeling. Painting - the inspired animation of the surface.

Stefan Szczesny

The artist may rightly venture the opinion that he does not convey ideas, does not preach, nor that he intents to convert people by using mass communication techniques... Better than handing out all kinds of wise advice, he could show life itself; he could awake forces lying dormant in everybody, he could launch an invitation to create direct and personal experiences.

I make all this stuff in the studio, but I also work on these white elephants — like House or Untitled Monument — things that are incredibly ambitious, take an awful long time to do, involve a lot of controversy, an awful lot of people, and don't make any money particularly, but it's just because I need to make them.

Rachel Whiteread

More and more, the subject of an exhibition tends not be the display of artworks, but the exhibition of the exhibition as a work of art. Here, the Documenta team, headed by Harald Szeemann, exhibits (artworks) and exposes itself (to critiques).

Another difficult thing that I experience is when after such a year of activity I have to empty my studio – completely. And I have found that this part only gets harder. You might think it gets easier, but I really just find it gets harder.