News and Updates about Sculpture

Beauty is a fine line between art and science for Pe Lang, a Swiss sculptor living and working in both Berlin and Zurich. The autodidact artist specializes in graceful, hand-built kinetic sculptures made of magnetic, electrical and mechanical devices, all of which are elegant and completely mesmerizing. "Positioning Systems - Falling Objects" is one of his newest contraptions, which feels like a mix of home waterfall fountains, mechanical metronomes and a busy manufacturing plant.

It's been a legendary year for snow art. First there was the Eiffel Tower penis. Then the crash-landed AT-AT. Then the beautiful snowdecahedron and the skull-shaped igloo fortress. Found on Unreality Mag, the latest newsworthy snow sculpture is every Star Wars-loving little kid's dream: an AT-AT "pony ride". Okay, so it's freezing cold. And it's technically immobile. Who cares. It's awesome.

Inspired by the vast and exotic geography of Iceland, Canadian-Hungarian artist Eszter Burghardt uses food and wool to reconstruct her memory of the landscape. The series, "Edible Vistas and Wooly Sagas", is molded from "poppy seeds, coco powder, coffee, milk, and chocolate cake crumbs" and Icelandic wool—there are endless herds of native sheep wandering the countryside. She then captured the dioramas with a macro lens.

Blacksmith Sage Werbock —also known as the Great Nippulini, "pierced weight lifting extraordinaire"—welded together this Star Wars Imperial Walker sculpture with a bunch of old computer parts and scrap metal. Currently listed on Etsy for $450, the AT-AT is artfully assembled as follows:

In "Cigarette Ash Landscape", Chinese artist and photographer Yang Yongliang suspends a huge cigarette sculpture above a pile of black and white photos, fake grass and artificial flowers. Upon closer examination, the tip of the cigarette reveals a tiny city made of fastidiously layered, paper-cut urban skylines.

The German police have their panties in a bunch over a highly inflammatory sculpture of a urinating policewoman by artist Marcel Walldorf. Entitled "Petra", the hyperrealistic figure depicts a female officer crouched, peeing with buttocks exposed. The most chilling detail is her riot baton casually propped on the wall next to her.

Household appliances enslave random body parts in a series of sculptures entitled "Integration Series" by Joseph Barbaccia.

We know it's fun to break stuff, but Santa sure isn't going to be as good to Michael Tompert next year. The San Francisco digital imaging and CGI artist destroyed a whole slew of brand-new Apple gadgets as a statement on "our relationship with fetish, fashion, freedom, and bondage."

UPDATE: Looks like the previously featured mysterious translucent skeletal specimens aren't the work of unknown scientists, but rather a project by Japanese scientist-turned-artist Iori Tomita.  Tomita majored in fisheries as an undergraduate student, and has since used his knowledge to create a beautiful collection of mutated sea creatures, called "New World Transparent Specimens". Tomita creates his specimens by dissolving their flesh, and then injecting dye into the skeletal system.

New York based studio softlab's latest installation "(n)arcissus" is an eye-bending site specific installation currently on display at the Frankfurter Kunstverein art center in Frankfurt, Germany. The piece, made with over 1,000 mylar and vinyl laser cut panels, hangs in a stairwell, measuring 9 meters tall from the lobby ceiling.

Love Lady Gaga's meat dress? Then check out Sung Yeonju's series entitled "Wearable Foods". The recent graduate of Korea's Hong Ik University creates garments out of a wide variety of edibles, including "Tomato #2", which was used by H&M for an ad campaign.

Engineer-turned-artist Jim Campbell's recent installation "Scattered Light" converts New York City's Madison Square Park into a ghostly world of light bulb pixels. Campbell dangled 2,000 floating LED light bulbs programmed to display shadowy human silhouettes passing by.

Oleg Mavromati's latest project, Ally/Foe, allows online voters the chance to electrocute the Russian artist at a mere fifty cents a pop. From November 7th to November 13th, viewers of Mavromati's livestream can pay to vote "innocent" or "guilty." 100 guilty votes result in the artist voluntarily shocking himself in front of the camera, live, with his homemade electrocution machine.

Dutch designers Marcia Nolte, Stijn van der Vleuten, and Bob Waardenburg are the masters of illusion behind We Make Carpets. Look, then look again. What you initially see isn't what it appears to be...

UK-based designer Dominic Wilcox's Speed Creating Project presents the challenge of making something creative everyday, for 30 consecutive days. Wilcox's best results are pointless in an utterly delightful way. True junk drawer resourcefulness. My 7 favorites below; click through for all 30.

We've seen chandeliers made from paper, light bulbs and Chiquita banana cartons, so why not ladies' undergarments? Video artist Pipilotti Rist recently showcased her glowing underwear chandelier at New York's Luhring Augustine gallery. Rist's underwear of choice (granny panties) aren't exactly sexy, but there's something oddly interesting about the cascading, pastel skivvies.

Choreographer Willi Dorner's curiously charming  "human sculptures" invade New York City as part of the French Institute Alliance Française's Crossing the Line festival. More images of Dorner's Bodies in Urban Spaces at the Wall Street Journal photography blog.

Designed by a computer, milled by machines and assembled by a team of robots, Federico Díaz's Geometric Death Frequency 141 isn't necessarily the warmest work of art you'll see this year. But it is, nevertheless, quite a lot of fun to behold:

As some of you may know, contemporary king of kitsch Jeff Koons exhibited at the French palace of Versailles last year. While the exhibition was embraced by many as an exciting context for contemporary art, predictably old fogies and critics of the art market balked.

Artist Sascha Nordmeyer presents her concept Communication Prosthesis as the "ultimate communication tool," or the solution to self-expression. Once inserted into the subject's mouth, the prosthesis forces strange (and horrific) expressions.

It is conceivable that Chinese artist Lei Wei has always dreamt of being a superhero. Or that he simply has the desire to fly. Or maybe he is constantly confronting a fear of heights. Whatever the impetus of his work may be, Wei creates illusions of a dangerous "reality".

Berlin based artist Nils Vöelker's plastic bag installation entitled "One Hundred and Eight" features 108 plastic bags that inflate and deflate by 216 individually controllable computer cooling fans. Völker originally intended the piece to be a giant display screen, but the end result became something much more compelling.

In keeping with today's theme of dark and twisted sweets (edible blood slides), check out this German gun-sucking art project. For a piece entitled Freeze: Revisited, Florian Jenett and Valentin Beinroth made handgun replicas crafted from ice, in an array of flavors, including coke, black currant, licorice, and cherry.

Would you glue fly legs to your eyelids? More or less stomach churning than gluing your eyelids to your...eyelids? (Shudder.)

When viewing Toronto based artist Evan Penny's work, Ron Mueck immediately comes to mind.

Texas based artist Shawn Smith brings the digital world to reality with his woodcut pixelated sculptures. The combination of a traditional material (wood) with a contemporary concept results in surprisingly fresh work. Plus, the craftsmanship appears to be impeccable. Check out his artist statement below.

We love it when everyday material is used in a new and unexpected application. Cardboard is something most of us take completely for granted. We need it when we're moving, and that's about it. When Frank Gehry created the cardboard chair in 1972, he blew the minds of both the furniture and the design world. So strong. So durable. So fluid.

Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson totally inspires us here at Wonderhowto. His waterfall installations on the Hudson River. His incredible sun exhibit at the Tate in London. His concepts and execution are dazzling. Plus he has Taschen book that weighs a frickin ton. (Yes. The tonnage does translate to respect.)

53-year-old artist Scottish artist David Mach uses tens of thousands of matchsticks to create sculptures of animals, as well as religious and political icons. He first creates a plastic or fiberglass mold, and then inserts the matchsticks, one at a time. His work sells anywhere from $30,000 to $52,000... unless he sets the piece on fire, of course.

INSANE what you can do with a truckload of packing tape. Viennese/Croatian design collective For Use/Numen uses the common junk drawer office supply to create massive, self-supportive cocoons that visitors can climb inside and explore.

I'm totally drooling over artist Azuma Makoto's insanely lush, decadent floral arrangement-sculptures. Drop. Dead. Beautiful.

When two houses were scheduled for demolition, artists Dan Havel and Dean Ruck of Art League Houston decided to take advantage of the situation and create the super trippy Tunnel House.

Hmm, what to do with all those old comic books lying around... How about a little Manga farming?

As a protest to American consumerism, NYC artist Jeremy Dean converted a Hummer H2 into a horse-drawn carriage "to show just how screwed and unsustainable the auto industry has become." Dean believes the gas guzzling SUV is the epitome of everything that is wrong with American consumerism. Whatever your political opinion may be, Dean's conversion is pretty striking.

Nothing better than toppling a domino chain and watching them fall. Worst part? Setting them all up again. Created by Los Angeles artist Karl Lautman, the Ouroborus Domino structure reconstructs itself after a single round of five times. Wonderfully clever and whimsical.

Remember the room with a rotating view?