Sculptures : 7 attitudes

The exhibition Sculptures : 7 attitudes gathers recent works of seven contemporary sculptors and gives an insight into seven very different ways to approach today's sculpture. Taking advantage of its so characteristic structure, the Casino Luxembourg will host each of these approaches and attitudes in one or two of its exhibition rooms, thus prompting a privileged meeting between the work and the onlooker. The exhibition allows a particular view on the more unconventional side of plastic arts that however offers the current tendencies of this art a new and wide range of possibilities and experimentations.

Material, volume and space are as much typical notions of contemporary sculpture as history, the relation to the place and the body, salvaged materials and their manufacturing. Thus Tony Cragg focusses on the accumulation of waste from the urban civilisation which will help him to create new poetic forms; Richard Deacon's works are made of the most diverse materials and particularly underline the importance of the assembling of the different components; Richard Mucha's creations integrate the notions of place and memory by transforming old objects; Didier Vermeiren analyses the history of sculpture and its presentation to suggest volumes of an eternal classicism; Peer Veneman creates three-dimensional objects which cannot be categorized in any of the traditional arts that are sculpture, painting, architecture or furniture; Franz West takes away the sacred aura of sculpture by simply transforming it into a usable extension of the human body; as for Erwin Wurm, he works with textile, highlights the human body and the notion of time in order to widen the concept of sculpture. This very limited selection which includes artists who have been deeply affecting the evolution of sculpture in recent years, is a possibility to grap this vast although fragile freedom of creation conquered through the widening of the notion of traditional sculpture.