Harriet Hosmer
American sculptor and innovator
American sculptor and innovator
The first woman sculptor to receive an order from the United States government for a statue.
Muriel Moody’s reputation rests primarily on her ceramic sculptures and some bronzes cast in the 1980s. Her work was original and distinctive, usually based on the human figure.
Molly Macalister was a passionate advocate for sculpture at a time when very little was made or exhibited in New Zealand. A founding member of the New Zealand Society of Sculptors and Associates (1961) and honorary life member from 1979, she was the prime mover behind the 1971 international sculpture symposium in Auckland.
The influence of Wearing’s 1992 Signs that Say can be seen across recent contemporary popular culture and media, particularly social media, wherein a photographic portrait of a stranger holding a handwritten sign in front of them is now a recognized format for truth-telling or confession.
The destruction of spaces and objects central to her method, as well as her poetic, delicate installations, have been hugely influential for process-driven sculptural artists like Simon Starling; artists working with found objects, like Sarah Lucas; and artists refiguring architectural spaces, like Rachel Whiteread.
Lucas seems to have gone from strength-to-strength following her acclaimed solo exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in 2013 and her triumphant pavilion showing at the 2015 Venice Biennale.
Rachel Whiteread is one of Britain’s leading contemporary artists. As the first woman to have won the Turner Prize, Whiteread is an important figure for many contemporary female artists especially in having developed a way of working that is not focused on women’s issues or on an explicitly feminist view point.
Emin’s work as part of the Young British Artists movement placed her firmly within a key legacy that was to affect the development of art in Britain for years to come.
Roni Horn played a major role in developing the visual and material language of Minimalism. From the 1980s onwards, she began to create sculptures that picked up on the movement’s interest in materials, yet ventured into Post-Minimalism by emphasizing the centrality of the viewer’s mind and body to the work’s meaning.