The grace and fluidity of the human body has been the inspiration for countless artists since antiquity. Among the earliest evidence of art depicting dance are 9,000-year-old paintings discovered in the Rock Shelters of Bhimbetka in India and Egyptian tomb paintings depicting dancing figures, dated c. 3300 BC. Fast forward in time, the 20th century saw a proliferation of kinetic art expressed in both paintings, as well as static and mobile sculptures, as artists such as Jean Tinguely (1925-1991) and Alexander Calder (1898-1976) created captivating works that engage viewers on both a visual and experiential level.
The works of Tinguely, Calder and others ushered in the era of abstract sculptures which continues to this day. With ingenuity and imagination, modern sculptors proved that materials such as wood, bronze and steel were no obstacles to making works that could flawlessly capture the grace and vitality of the human body in the throes of a dance, seemingly defying the odds posed by the hardness of the materials. The photo gallery below is a celebration of their creative powers.
Abstract Dance Sculptures of the 20th and 21st Century
Hans (Jean) Arp (1886-1966), better known as Jean Arp, was at the forefront of the 20th-century avant-garde movement, associated strongly with Surrealism and Dadaism. Over a period of more than sixty years, Arp produced an extraordinarily influential body of work that shifts fluidly between abstraction and representation, and between organic and geometric forms. The list of artists Arp befriended and collaborated with reads like a Who’s Who of the avant garde: Max Ernst, Joan Miró, Amedeo Modigliani, Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian, Sonia and Robert Delaunay, Francis Picabia, Paul Klee, Kurt Schwitters – to name just a few. The sculpture featured below, entitled L’Etoile (Star) is a 1956 masterpiece, one that mirror’s Arp’s fascination in the use of biomorphic forms and the human figure to articulate movement.
Created in his signature kinetic style, this lively sculpture consists of carefully arranged stainless steel elements that seem to dance with the slightest breeze, each component pivoting delicately in a mesmerizing interplay of form and shadows.
George Rickey (1907-2002) was an American artist whose minimalist kinetic sculptures poeticized the medium of steel in a transformative manner. “I wanted only the most ordinary shapes—simple, hackneyed, geometrical. I wanted whatever eloquence there was to come out of the performance of the piece—never out of the shape itself.” Rickey once said. His works were exhibited at The Museum of Modern Art in New York, and commissioned for several public spaces around the world. Today, his sculptures are held in the collections of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Honolulu Museum of Art, and the San Diego Museum of Art, among others.
This work by the Italian artist, Nino Franchina was created around the same time as the George Ricky sculpture. Is it a case of one artist influencing the other, or one of happy coincidence (“great minds think alike”)? Whichever the case, Franchina’s piece is yet another proof that the stiffness of a material is no obstacle for making sculptures tht can evoke a graceful sense of movement.
I love the sculptures of Joel Shapiro (pictured above). The American artist pushes the boundaries of what material can do with a fertile imagination that has produced a body of work with remarkable visual appeal. Shapiro works mostly with rectangular blocks of bronzes and wood, cutting and joining pieces of these to create stick-like figures of the human body in the act of dance or acrobatics. Every one of his sculptures subverts the distinction between representation and abstraction; every piece elicits a sense of movement that engages the viewers’ physical and visual perception of space.
Here are two examples of Shapiro’s quirky dance figures.
The next work, also in bronze, is by the German sculptor, Kuno Vollet (n. 1951). Here, the sense of movement is portrayed by the interplay between space and twisty curls of bronze.
The same visual “trick” is used in this sculpture by American artists, John Procario and Alex Roskin which they call ‘Anthropose’, a blend of the Greek word anthropos (human and pose (stance).
The next piece is a delightful wood sculpture called ‘Little Dancer’ that now graces my living room. I love the two-color tone of the work and the fluid articulation of motion implied by the dance. The sculptor is Chandler McLellan who is based in Wyoming in the US.
The final piece is a visual treat byBarcelona sculptor, Carlo Cascales Alimbau called Les Danseurs (the dancers).
