Alexandra Bircken

Born 1967, Cologne, Germany / Lives and works in Cologne, Germany, and London, United Kingdom

Alexandra Bircken’s sculptures and installations consist of knitted together bits of wood, branches, stone, metal, dried plants, and leather. The objects come in many forms: cuddly wool-covered stubs and rocketlike shapes, webs that have caught detritus and treasures alike, and weighty buds and flowers that dangle on the end of a potted stem. Bircken’s involvement with the preciousness and abjection of fashion and flower arrangement synthesizes a homely, therapeutic, arts-and-crafts aesthetic to create amuletlike objects that border on the spiritual, if not the occult.

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John Bock

Born 1965, Gribbohm, Germany/Lives and works in Berlin, Germany

John Bock works with sculpture and performance to produce immersive universes that vary widely in scale and material. Some are constructed from found objects, others from materials like fabric, metal, food, and clothing. The recurring symbol of an astronaut – or, as Bock calls him, “a little man in space” – expresses the scientific, political, technological, and philosophical concerns that converge in his collaged objects, “lecture” performances and films.

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Carol Bove

Born 1971, Geneva, Switzerland/Lives and works in New York City

Carol Bove’s sculptural configurations bring together appropriated objects and ephemera in tableaus that allude to a personalized reading of postwar history. Her narratives reflect the specificities of time and place, with a particular interest in the social and political context of the 1960s and 70s. Bove’s approach to the space of the white cube is aligned with the art-historical period of minimalists such as Carl Andre, Sol LeWitt, and John McCracken, although the conceptual framing of Bove’s works often derives from 1980s appropriation. The result is a delightful tension between appropriated objects, such as paperback books and photographs, which seem to speak directly to the ambitions and failures of modernism as expressed through interior design.

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Martin Boyce

Born 1967, Glasgow, Scotland/Lives and works in Glasgow, Scotland

Martin Boyce’s installations draw on fashion, music, architecture, and, in particular, design. Using the formal vocabulary of modernism, Boyce recreates its essential components and structures and transforms them into what he calls “unstable landscapes” in which social exchange might occur. His sculptural hybrids of furniture, objects, and lighting seem as if they were made for urban parks, foyers, lobbies, and small outdoor spaces, but there is a cinematic quality to Boyce’s arrangements. Within these fractured landscapes, the artist attempts to push modernist design signifiers to their most disassembled state, demonstrating how they continue to be recognizable in both high and low cultures, even if stripped of their original function.

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Tobias Buche

Born 1978, Berlin, Germany/Lives and works in Berlin, Germany

Tobias Buche’s installations are simple structures that take inspiration from museological kiosks and pieces of institutional architecture. In Buche’s case, signage is replaced with documents and photos drawn from mass media, pop culture, art and the Internet. Taking as his inspiration the German art historian Aby Warburg, whose Mnemosyne Atlas used imagery and documentation from different historical and geographical sources to develop art history without text, Buche creates a narrative that combines personal and historical facts, presenting a cultural history that is free of an overarching linguistic structure.

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Carlos Bunga

Born 1976, Oporto, Portugal/Lives and works in Lisbon, Portugal

Carlos Bunga is best known for his large-scale cardboard and packing tape installations that are painted and then cut away to reveal ruins of his particular form of architecture. Bunga’s more discrete sculptures, fashioned out of the same materials, intimately express the temporal aspects of place in a globalized context. Bunga’s use of color and roughly cut forms recall the decayed insides of Gordon Matta-Clark’s architectural cuttings. Like Matta-Clark, Bunga applies abstraction to architecture and living environments.

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Tom Burr

Born 1963, New Haven, Connecticut/Lives and works in New York City, New York, and Norfolk, Connecticut

Tom Burr’s work is concerned with the erosion of public spaces, especially the kind that remain in a state of disuse, like public restrooms and peepshow booths, as well as the exposure of private ones, like beach cabanas and bedroom walls. Influenced by minimalism, many of Burr’s sculptures are hinged, mirrored panels that incorporate personal effects like books, neckties, martini glasses, bottles, belts, chains, and photographs. The panels are installed in relation to features of the gallery space. They might be positioned like kiosks, jutting up from the floor in a triangular configuration or leaning against the wall. That Burr’s sculptures are collapsible and dependent upon their environments alludes to the artist’s interest in the awkward and precarious status of the artistic persona and related modernist constructions.

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Abraham Cruzvillegas

Born 1968, Mexico City, Mexico/Lives and works in Mexico City

Abraham Cruzvillegas’s sculptural practice is closely linked to the Duchampian transformation of everyday objects into art. Early on, Cruzvillegas appropriated folk art made by his father, whose dedication to traditional craft lent a critical layer to the idea of the readymade. While his father made the objects out of economic need, the artist’s repositioning of this work as contemporary art zeroed in on the often unaddressed issues of labor and credit that is embedded in appropriationist strategies. Cruzvillegas has also used ephemeral materials such as cake or maguey leaves to produce artworks that change over the course of the exhibition, highlighting the fragility of an object’s structural and seductive qualities.

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Aaron Curry

Born 1972, San Antonio, Texas/Lives and works in Los Angeles, California

Aaron Curry constructs brightly painted sculptures from found materials, including cardboard, twine, beads, wood and posters. Evocative of mid-century modernists such as Friedrich Kiesler, Alexander Calder, Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore, Curry’s three-dimensional works are outlined in Day-Glo colors with bright white centers, giving his biomorphic abstractions a hard and futuristic edge. This scramble of periods is complicated further by Curry’s use of contemporary movie posters as bases for his works. The juxtaposition of scantily clad starlets with neo-primitivistic forms refers to the changeability, yet continuity, of mythic symbols in visual culture. Curry often couples his sculptures with collages, which also take their inspiration from the futuristic primitivism of the mid-twentieth century. Often hung in ensembles, Curry’s installations offer a fresh take on the line between collage and assemblage, as well as the one between sculpture and design.

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Sam Durant

Born 1961, Boston, Massachusetts/Lives and works in Los Angeles, California

Sam Durant’s politically engaged artistic practice is realized through photography, drawings, text, and sculpture. Transforming activist gestures into sculptural objects (and vice versa), the artist has extensively explored the notion of protest both as a subject and as material for visual art. His three-dimensional work often addresses architecture, civic design and, in particular, monuments. Durant’s 2005 exhibition entitled Proposal for White and Indian Dead Monuments Transposition, Washington, D.C. proposed to assemble twenty-five monuments on the Washington Mall for lives lost during the Indian War. The project featured replicas of monuments from various locations throughout the United States, all of which made use of the ancient obelisk form that can be seen in commemorative statuary from the time of the pharaohs to today’s Washington Monument.

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Urs Fischer

Born 1973, Zurich, Switzerland/Lives and works New York City

Urs Fischer uses a range of mediums to express the transience of art and, concomitantly, the human condition. Fischer has described his regard for the boredom that comes with everyday activities, and in his work the prominence of chairs and shadows — often fused together into one object — is an indication of the artist’s interest in equilibrium in time. Alternately, the artist has produced completely ephemeral works of art, including wax sculptures of three nude women that he made for his exhibition at Sadie Coles HQ in London. Entitled

What If the Phone Rings

(2003), the pieces were lit like candles during the opening and allowed to melt away over the course of the exhibition.

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Claire Fontaine

Claire Fontaine is a Paris-based collective founded in 2004

Taking her name from a brand of French notebooks, Claire Fontaine is also a fictional persona created as part of a two-artist collaboration. Herself a readymade, Claire Fontaine’s very existence is a form of neo-appropriation that questions, in her own words, “the crisis of singularity in contemporary art.” Claire Fontaine is currently working with les Editions La Fabrique, Paris, to prepare a book about the readymade artist and the idea of the “human strike,” or aggressive silences and the halting of human production, a concept drawn from 1970s Italian feminism.

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Isa Genzken

Born 1948, Bad Oldesloe, Germany/Lives and works in Berlin, Germany

Isa Genzken’s sculptural practice overlaps with film, photography, video, collage, books and works on paper to reflect the anarchy and chaos of the urban landscape. Almost always architecturally inflected, many of Genzken’s sculptures are recognizable as small-scale skyscraper figures that range in density from intense combinations of graphic and painterly detritus to brutalist, concrete buildings with little detail or color. Genzken’s play with scale and montage, in which objects, images and poured paint collide, generates ruptures in visual perception, giving pause to the ways in which the external world is perceived.

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Rachel Harrison

Born 1966, New York City/Lives and works in New York City

In Rachel Harrison’s sculptures, signifiers of pop art and pop culture are embedded within larger minimalist forms, teasing out relationships between aesthetics and mediums that are seemingly at odds with one another. Integrating photography into her sculptures, Harrison’s works remind the viewer of the space between the physical experience of a three-dimensional object and the representational mode of photography. The awkward but poignant combination of disparate artistic ideologies is further expressed in the tension between the details that incorporate mass-produced or kitschy objects, like fan magazines and costume jewelry, and the artist’s lumpy treatment of the sculptural surface. Many of Harrison’s works reveal their internal structures of Styrofoam, plywood, cement, and papier-mâché, forcing process into dialogue with artistic movements (e.g., pop and minimalism) that are typically mechanically rendered.

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Elliott Hundley

Born 1975, USA/Lives and works in Los Angeles, California

Elliott Hundley’s collaged wall works and sculptures, assembled from found materials—bamboo, string, paper, photographs, magazine clippings, plastic, and foam—loosely jumble together narrative bits and scraps of information. Hundley’s choice of found, often ephemeral objects embeds each work with sentimentality and personal meaning, but these small-scale details are at times suggestive of more universal imagery and ideas: mythology, forces of nature, and aerial views of vast and fantastic landscapes.

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Gabriel Kuri

Born 1970, Mexico City, Mexico/Lives and works in Mexico City and Brussels, Belgium

Gabriel Kuri’s three-dimensional work is informed by everyday actions that qualify as sculptural experience, such as carrying shopping bags filled with store-bought goods. Recent works have been made from easily found materials: a slab of stone, plastic bags, canned juice, refrigerators, plastic wrap, sales receipts, and tar paper. Combined into minimalist configurations, the sculptural components precariously balance among one another, sometimes changing according to shifts in the wind or light. Within Kuri’s works are juxtapositions of unrelated objects whose impermanent assemblages reflect on the nature of more worldly issues, such as cultural identity, economic structures, class issues, history, and temporality.

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Jim Lambie

Born 1964, Glasgow, United Kingdom/Lives and works in Glasgow

Jim Lambie, who studied environmental art at the Glasgow School of Art, transforms everyday materials into works that make reference to aspects of popular culture, such as music, fashion and pop spirituality. A DJ and the member of the band the Boy Hairdressers, a British group modeled after 1970s noise bands, Lambie frequently incorporates records, record covers and the detritus of 1970s glitter rock to create compositions that are humorous but also somewhat nostalgic for Glaswegian club life. Lambie was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2005.

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Nate Lowman

Born 1979, Las Vegas, Nevada/Lives and works in Brooklyn, New York

Nate Lowman’s neo-appropriationist approach to sculpture and installation combines anthropological remains such as news media, graffiti, and bumper stickers to generate a double-edged critique of American culture. Although Lowman’s work is influenced by such earlier appropriation artists as Andy Warhol, Richard Prince, and Cady Noland, his own brand of image recycling disperses into an unstructured installation-environment in which posters, record jackets and silk-screened imagery create a large-scale narrative that ruminates on specific issues, from American gun culture to celebrity cults.

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Sarah Lucas

Born 1962, London, United Kingdom/Lives and works in London, United Kingdom

Since her debut two decades ago as one of the strongest of the so-called YBAs (Young British Artists), Sarah Lucas has developed a sculptural language that takes as its subject the seediness of sex, the inescapability of social class and the arbitrary nature of power and victimhood. Two of her best-known works, Au Naturel (1994) and Two Fried Eggs and a Kebab (1992)—the latter comprised of two fried eggs and a meat sandwich—present grotesque standins for a man’s and a woman’s sexual organs, respectively. Other everyday objects, including pantyhose, toilets, cigarettes, tables, chairs, and buckets, are used to comment upon our highly charged relationships to human anatomy and sexuality in general. However straightforward her imagery, her entire sculptural project aims to pick apart the political, economic, and social complexities of intimacy using an artistic language that makes reference to such artistic movements as Arte Povera, minimalism and surrealism.

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Matthew Monahan

Born 1972, Eureka, California/Lives and works in Los Angeles, California

Before taking up his sculptural practice, Monahan perfected his ability to articulate formal and abstract drawings on paper, which he brought into three dimensions through folding. In his sculptures, groupings of vitrines and plinths are incorporated as supports for his delicate combinations of paper, industrial foam and various found objects. Monahan’s forms have a macabre aspect. Mummies, robots, photographs, crumpled muslin, and historical ephemera create psychic landscapes somewhere between cinematic tableaus and anthropological displays.

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Kristen Morgin

Born 1968, Brunswick, Georgia/Lives and works in Los Angeles, California

Working with unfired clay, Kristen Morgin can, as if by magic, create facsimiles of objects found in both nature and culture. Whether they are teacups or carousel horses, her works have the patina of great age and are fractured into many pieces. As a result, each work simultaneously memorializes and destroys on impact the object it portrays. Her decayed life-sized objects are realistic in scale and shape, yet they are abstracted through the process of their degradation.

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Manfred Pernice

Born 1963, Hildesheim, Germany/Lives and works in Berlin, Germany

Manfred Pernice’s sculptural works are at once familiar and generic structures that take cues from basic architectural forms found in public spaces, including kiosks, phone booths and street lamps, while also referring to grand monuments, such as citadels, sepulchres, and industrial towers. His installations play with scale and shape in an effort to defamiliarize us with architecture in the urban landscape. Constructed from materials that include wood, chipboard, concrete, photographs and tiles, each artwork makes reference to utility but ultimately sets up an aesthetic of ambiguity surrounding the object’s function.

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Anselm Reyle

Born 1970, Tübingen, Germany/Lives and works in Berlin, Germany

Like other neoappropriationists, central to Anselm Reyle’s work is the art objet trouvé. From abstract and monochromatic paintings to the relics of industry on the verge of obsolescence, Reyle resurrects artistic forms that have reached the status of cliché. Interested in the “classic tradition of modernism,” Reyle’s striped paintings, monochromatic PVC foil paintings, lamp sculptures and neon-painted farm implements stylishly recall the high-minded modernist tropes that have been domesticated into popular design.

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Marc André Robinson

Born 1972, Los Angeles, California/Lives and works in Brooklyn, New York

Marc André Robinson works with sculpture, drawing, painting, and video to express the ever-shifting status of blackness in Western culture. In Shame (2003), a continually slick, shining, black oil painting implicates viewers as their reflection appears, disappears, and returns. Blood for oil and fear of blackness are two layers of the painting, and even deeper yet is Robinson’s interest in reinscribing minimalism with political meaning.

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Eva Rothschild

Born 1972, Dublin, Ireland/Lives and works in London, United Kingdom

In Eva Rothschild’s sculptures, objects reminiscent of 1960s-70s minimalism are imbued with formal qualities and materials associated with magic and new-age spirituality. Made from leather fringe, transparent acrylic, wood and incense sticks, her pared-down structures are often reduced to their outlines, becoming almost weightless in their occupation of the gallery space. Concerned with systems of belief, Rothschild’s woven posters and curtains are imprinted with collaged images from found posters, op art patterns, postcards and photographs. Her choice of imagery is determined by what she describes as an experience of stoppage–if an image is arresting, it has the potential to inspire consciousness.

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Lara Schnitger

Born 1969, Haarlem, Netherlands/Lives and works in Los Angeles, California, and Amsterdam, Netherlands

Lara Schnitger applies domestic arts, such as sewing and quilting, to a brand of sculpture-making that merges design with modernist architecture. Knitted and sewn, hairy and bulging, her sculptures have the tendency to anthropomorphize into figures that express pent-up aggressions and sexual desires. The semi-transparent sections of some of Schnitger’s works reveal the crude engineering of the structures within.

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Gedi Sibony

Born 1973, New York City/Lives and works in New York City

Gedi Sibony uses construction materials, including industrial floor coverings, hollowcore doors, garbage bags, plywood, and vinyl, to produce sculptures and installations whose delicate elegance belies their do-it-yourself roots. At times, Sibony’s artwork operates against the traditional parameters of sculptural objects. Often dealing with the notion of absence, Sibony’s works are open-ended in their interpretation, seemingly proving that less material generates more meaning. His titles are integral to the works, describing the nuances of material and spatial relationships in much the same way as Barry Le Va’s titles of his early scatter installations.

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Shinique Smith

Born 1972, Baltimore, Maryland/Lives and works in Brooklyn, New York

Drawing from cast-off materials that litter the urban landscape, Shinique Smith’s sculptures compress the lives of the objects she ties together — clothing, textiles, shoes and stuffed toys — with twine, ribbon and the like. Her sensibility is influenced by abstract expressionism, graffiti and Japanese calligraphy. From Smith’s Bale Variants to Bundles that range in scale from human-sized towers to more petite and portable assemblages, Smith’s works refer specifically to the inequities of a global economy in which thrown-away clothing from the First World is shipped in bales to the Third. Her larger Bale Variants memorialize what is lost along the way. Her more recent projects have shifted towards immersive installations that reflect on the economies of excess and need.

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Nobuko Tsuchiya

Born 1972, Yokohama, Japan/Lives and works in London, United Kingdom

Nobuko Tsuchiya is occupied with issues of time, and her sculptures seem to capture the moments when past and future, history and fantasy, come together. Tsuchiya often layers old and new objects within a single sculpture. Old is indicated by the use of decaying and weathered relics that rest on newer structures, such as the frame of a modernist shelf or table. Composed found materials that include vials, plates, string, pipes, air ducts and satellite dishes, her sculptures take on a comic sensibility, as if one of these pseudo-scientific constructions could play host to a tiny race of aliens.

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Rebecca Warren

Born 1965, London, United Kingdom/Lives and works in London, United Kingdom

Whether made of unfired clay or bronze, Rebecca Warren’s sculptures are bulbous, messy, voluptuous forms that oscillate between cartoonish figuration and abstraction at its most outrageously biomorphic. Reminiscent of art-historical icons ranging from Umberto Boccioni’s Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (1913) to the late sculptures of Willem de Kooning, Warren’s objects, despite their solidity, seem to be melting, morphing or even wiggling. This instability and movement is reinforced by Warren’s choice of base, which is often a wooden shelf on wheels. Strikingly feminine in form, Warren’s works verge on the grotesque. They are also deeply sensuous, radiating the artist’s pleasure in the manipulation of matter.

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