WARMENHOVEN & VENDERBOS Blog » sculptural

Zimoun | Sound Sculptures & Installations

W&V — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 05:24:42 +0000

Zimoun is a Swiss artist who is residing in Bern. To develop his work he has often collaborated with other artists and experts who work in various other fields like for example architecture, science, research engineering.

The sound sculptures and installations of Zimoun are graceful, mechanized works of playful poetry, their structural simplicity opens like an industrial bloom to reveal a complex and intricate series of relationships, an ongoing interplay between the artificial and the organic. We find these intriguing sculptures fascinating and very inspiring.

Photos and video by Zimoun | Zimoun website

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Naoko Yoshimoto | conceptual clothing sculptures

W&V — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 10:13:45 +0000

Silent voice | 300×240×45cm | used white clothes

Japanese artist Naoko Yoshimoto began her career studying psychology at the University of Kyoto but moved gradually after it more into art. Her main medium are clothing and textiles. She creates very interesting and strong conceptual sculptures and installations made from garments like for example dresses, tops and trousers.

In the early days as she began collecting these clothes she saw them a bit as symbols of the people living in the places where she met the clothes. She imagined the histories behind them. Touching these used garments, gave her the idea she gained a feeling for the memories of these people and their everyday lives which the garments used to touch, a feeling that could not be communicated by words. But after while this gave her an uneasy feeling as she realized that she could imagine the people and the everyday life of the place she visited, but that she could not directly touch them. There was a feeling of distance and uncertainties. These thoughts had great influence of her current work and made sure she shifted even more towards a conceptual approach in her work.

In some of her current works like for example ” silent voice”, “shadow portrait” or “history behind clothes” she removes the colour of garments by bleaching or uses white coloured garments and compresses and condenses these “white shaded” clothes and transforms them into building blocks for her conceptual sculptures. These works depict conventional as well as more abstract objects and give an interesting social commentary which is created by the medium and its carrier.

White coffin | 205×85×65cm | used white shirts

White coffin detail | 205×85×65cm | used white shirts

Shadow portrait | 40×640×12cm | used white clothes

White coffin | 205×85×65cm | used white shirts

Shadow portrait | 40×640×12cm | used white clothes

White coffin | 150×130×180cm | used white shirts

River of oblivion detail | bleached clothes

River of oblivion | bleached clothes

Photos Naoko Yoshimoto | conceptual clothing sculptures

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Willy Verginer | sculptures and vibrant colour blocking

W&V — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 07:54:46 +0000

Sculptor Willy Verginer was born in 1957 in Bressanone and currently works and lives in Ortisei, Italy. He creates interesting sculptures and installations using the traditional craft of woodcarving. At first glance all the figures seem to reflect everyday life. This idea gets strengthened by the fact that most of them also wear contemporary casual clothing. They also have a link with the archaic and classic Greek sculptures. However, a closer and more focused look at the work shows that it goes beyond just that. The compositions of the installations, the positioning, the inclusion of surreal elements and the use of vibrant colour blocking across three dimensional surfaces which cuts the sculptures into fragments, lifts these works above just pure perceptual and figurative art. These elements and details give the viewer an access into the deeper conceptual layers of the fascinating work produced by Willy Verginer.

Photos: Willy Verginer | sculptures and installations

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Christopher Coppers reinterprets (fashion-)magazines

W&V — Fri, 28 May 2010 08:58:44 +0000

Christopher Coppers is a Belgian artist who is based in Brussels. His current work consists, for a large part, of interventions, either with, within or on magazines. Construction and deconstruction are important key elements in his art. He has by now used many different magazines as his medium, for the most fashion related ones. Some examples are: Elle, Vogue, BEople, Playboy,View magazine, Vanity Fair and ID fashion magazine.
He Combines his love for printed matter with an obvious urge for creative distortion or destruction. Christopher extremely careful and diligent revisits these magazines, he dramatically reinterprets the original covers by intricately carving them and so transforming them into sculptures. By doing this he gives them a second purpose, a second life.

Photos: Christopher Coppers | magazines

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Kinetic Sculpture, metaphorical translation of the process of form-finding

W&V — Mon, 24 May 2010 11:09:12 +0000

The Kinetic Sculpture by Art+Com is a fascinating metaphorical translation of the process of form-finding in art and design. The interplay of mechanical and electronic components creates a dynamic art piece reflecting the precise exchange between a great number of individual elements and the single, coherent picture that emerges from them.714 metal spheres, hanging from thin steel wires attached to individually-controlled stepper motors and covering the area of six square meters, animate a seven minute long mechatronic narrative. In the beginning, moving chaotically, then evolving to several competing forms that eventually resolve to the finished object, the Kinetic Sculpture creates an artistic visualisation of the process of form-finding in different variations.

The installation is on display in the BMW museum, Munich, Germany.

Video and Photos: Art+Com | BMW Museum, Munich

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E.V. Day architectural clothing sculptures

W&V — Mon, 03 May 2010 13:47:23 +0000

Bride fight is an already older but still very unique and interesting installation by American artist E.V. Day (1967, New York). She Used heavy-duty fishing line and hardware to reassembled clothing items which where untangled into small pieces.

Taking as her subject an eruption in the traditional social fabric the idea of two “glowing” brides locked in mortal combat E.V. Day touches something dark in the American social unconscious. Her work does link to reality television shows about brides-to-be, like Bridezilla, where tension gets to a boiling-point because of all the planning and frustration. But although E.V. Day’s piece may trigger such fetishistic responses it is a work primarily characterized by the humor and anxiety that accompanies a transformation of tradition. Fierce but nonetheless liberating, Bride Fight feels more like the jouissance of exploded boundaries than the pathology of confined ones.

The bride fight installation developed from a series of installations called Exploding Couture, begun in 1999, in which Day suspended women’s dresses in space. For example, in Bombshell (1999), exhibited at the 2000 Whitney Biennial, Day took a piece of iconic attire (Marilyn Monroe’s white halter dress) and arranged it to feel as if the forces of the implied figure are so powerful that the garment literally blows off, as if outgrowing its stereotype.

The visual result of the works are extremely light sculptures with architectural features.

Photos: E.V. Day | Lever House, New York

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Baptiste Debombourg: Turbo

W&V — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 13:05:42 +0000

The turbo wave of the 80′s left its mark on the industry and on the whole cultural situation in Western Europe. The sound effect gives sensation of real physical power. This music genre, which originated in the Balkans, and its impact are the inspiration for the work of Serbian artist Baptiste Debombourg. The music becomes a conceptual model of behaviour and is translated into wall deformed by the power of a musical wave. This installation is melted with the architecture of the surrounding space and so becomes part of it.

Photos: Baptiste Debombourg | Patricia Dorfmann Gallery Paris | Galerie HO Marseilles | Galerija10m2 Sarajevo

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Spencer Tunick major installations

W&V — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 06:38:27 +0000

The monumental installations created by ,the New York based artist, Spencer Tunick are an inspiring and interesting dialogue between the naked human body and the public spaces they are placed in. But, at the same time, they are also a dialogue between the individual human and the larger group. By taking pictures of hundreds and sometimes thousands of naked bodies at specific locations he transforms human individuals to sculptural objects. By doing this he shows and opens a new point of view or perception of humans, nature and architecture.

In his early work he focussed more on individual nude bodies or small groups. This made these works more intimate compared to the massive installations for which he is now known. His work can be considered as a crossover between an installation and a performance.

Spencer Tunick:
“A body is a living entity. It represents life, freedom, sensuality, and it is a mechanism to carry out our thoughts. A body is always beautiful to me. It depends on the individual work and what I do with it and what kind of idea lies behind it — if age matters or not. But in my group works, the only difference is how far people can go if it rains, snows etc.”

On March 1st, 2010 he created his latest work. Tunick set up a series of installations titled “The Base” on the Sydney Opera House Forecourt and inside the Opera House. These installations were carried out as part of the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras and were Tunick’s first large-scale installation in Sydney, with over 5,200 participants.

In the below video by Ralph Goertz, Spencer Tunick was followed by the Institut für Kunstdokumentation und Szenografie during the creation of his installation at the Museum Kunst Palast, Düsseldorf in 2006.

Photos top Spencer Tunick | Photo centre Reuters | Photo bottom Wood/Getty | Video by Ralph Goertz, Institut für Kunstdokumentation und Szenografie

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Frederic Geurts architectural, monumental, dialogue and balance

W&V — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 16:01:37 +0000

The work of the Belgian artist Frederic Geurts consists of monumental, but very fragile architectural structures, in which the artist goes to the extreme in exploring the boundaries of the force of gravity and the materiality of the structures.

Frederic Geurts: “I cannot act in a vacuum. I need context. I would like to play and interact with the environment. Both the spatial architectural aspects as well as the meaning of a place are important. In that sense, I am more a designer. Like for example an architect who starts creating after he has received a package of demands given by his client. I create such a demands program for myself.”

In the below, Dutch spoken, video Frederic Geurts gives a few days before the opening of his most recent exhibition called (un)balanced a tour to Jan Boelen the artistic director of the Z33 art centre.

Photos: Frederic Geurts (un)balanced |

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Erika Hock conceptual objects and pressure

W&V — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 11:37:12 +0000

“Weil ich es sage” (Because I say so) is an installation by the German artist Erika Hock. The title of the work reminds one of the conceptual writing piece by Robert Rauschenberg ( This is a portrait of Iris Clert if I say so). But ,looking at the other works and their titles in the series (how to love a bomb, gebeugt, es musste sein), Hock links more to the fact that she is challenging the resistance of a “strong, seemingly unmovable obstacle or barrier”,physical as well as mental. She increases the pressure with a belt on a “virtual” solid wall or block to a point where it bends and breaks, she drops a large solid cube so it damages by the impact but also under its own weight. The rigidness object reveals its weakness, its smooth skin cracks, it’s authority flows away and it becomes fragile. The clean and sharp geometry gets affected, distorted and damaged. Forged by pressure, a concept which also can be seen in and linked to the Imploded Sculptures by Ewerdt Hilgemann. In these sculptures Hilgemann used also external pressure, in his case created by a vacuum inside the object, to reshape large stainless steel geometric bodies. But where Hilgemann uses these real rigid materials for his objects, Hock basically creates the illusion of a rigid objects by using wood, gypsum cardboard, latex foam and adhesive polishing plaster. This fact adds yet another layer to the conceptual content and meaning of her works.

Hock has made a strong statement with this series of interesting conceptual pieces.

Photos: Erika Hock | Conceptual Installations

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