Sculpture with a beginning and no end
The Elements in Fragments exhibition by visual artist António Spinosa draws us into the universe of early modern sculpture, where the work is humanized, thereby creating the possibility for a direct dialogue between the spectator and the sculpture. In this installation, the sculptures start from our scale—our bodies, our feet—and multiply modularly.
The installation consists of 10 corten steel sculptures designed for the cloister of the National Museum of Natural History and Science in Lisbon, where the artist interacts with the space and the site of its construction. The creation assumes its form spontaneously; thus, it should not be considered merely as a formal object. Since the 20th century, sculpture has aimed to find alternatives to the monument, as argued by Rosalind Krauss. “One of the most remarkable aspects of modern sculpture is the way it manifests the growing awareness among its practitioners that sculpture is a medium of expression uniquely situated at the junction between rest and movement, between captured time and the passage of time. It is from this tension, which defines the very condition of sculpture, that its enormous expressive power derives.” (Rosalind Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture).
