Look! It’s Moving, It’s Alive!
Sixty years of restless sculpture
You know when you’re looking at art and somehow it manages to convey feelings or sensations that are going on for you at that particular moment in time? I had that experience over and over again this week as I walked round the new exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in London called When Forms Come Alive: Sixty Years of Restless Sculpture.
I’m not sure what I was expecting from this show, although if I’m honest I was just ticking a ‘show them some sculpture’ box for my students before the end of the semester. I definitely wasn’t expecting to be moved by it like I was. Looking at some of these works was almost the equivalent of physically touching and feeling them with your eyes. In the words of the curator Ralph Rugoff, they invite us to look with a ‘tactile gaze’.
When Forms Come Alive is a show exploring the history of contemporary sculptural forms that are static and yet have some sort of dynamic tension in them. The different levels of energy emanating from the objects is palpable. The exhibition is constructed like a sort of theatrical set, with lighting and sound adding to the drama of it. These inanimate objects are the actors on the stage, communicating softly and then loudly, one taking over from the next, speeding up the pace and then slowing it down, as you move through the…
