Taking Shape

Description

Although sculpture and the decorative arts share common ground, they are rarely considered together. Taking Shape challenges the reason why sculpture is usually considered alone, in the gallery, and the decorative arts are considered as part of a period setting. It suggests that by breaking away from these conventional categories we can see how sculpture is also part of a spatial conversation, and how furniture and fittings can be appreciated as unique works.

With forty complete catalogue entries and a wealth of installation photographs, this publication both documents an exhibition and goes beyond it, opening our eyes to the fluidity of formal language in the 'long' eighteenth century, and to the ways in which objects can change according to whether they are seen together or apart, as mobile or fixed, as two- or three-dimensional, as ideal or as functional.

Featuring a foreword by Penelope Curtis (Curator of the Henry Moore Institute), introduction by Martina Droth (Research Co-ordinator, the Henry Moore Institute) and five original essays:

Truth and Artifice: Transforming the Real with Sculptural Form
Martina Droth

Seeing Metamorphosis in Sculpture and Decorative Arts
Mary Sheriff (Associate Art Professor, University of North Carolina)

Figure and Ornament: Notes on the Late Baroque Art Industry
Katie Scott (Reader, Courtauld Institute, London)

The Decorated Flame: Firedogs and the Tensions of the Hearth
Mimi Hellman (Assistant Professor of Art History, Skidmore College)

Integral and Participatory: Sculpture in Support of the Decorative Arts
Charissa Bremer-David (Curator, Department of Sculpture and Decorative Arts, J. Paul Getty Museum)