Sculpture

For three months art lovers have had nothing but screens to look at. As one New York dealer complained to the Art Newspaper in May, ‘Everything is so flat — except for the curve,’ referring to the infection rate. Flatness isn’t such a problem for paintings, which are flat anyway, or for digital media obviously. The art form that has suffered most from the lockdown is sculpture, since no 360˚navigation technology yet invented can replicate the experience of walking around a 3-D object. So it’s fortuitous that Gagosian is unlocking its three London spaces to a trio of new exhibitions of 3-D works, under wraps since March. A woodcarving impregnated

Whee-ooh-whee ya-ya-yang skrittle-skrittle skreeeek… Is it a space pod bearing aliens from Mars? No, it’s a podcast featuring aliens from Venus: women sculptors. If the intro music to Sculpting Lives: Women & Sculpture sounds like Dr Who, its two jolly presenters — Jo Baring, director of the Ingram Collection of Modern British & Contemporary Art, and Sarah Turner, deputy director for research at the Paul Mellon Centre for British Art — come across as younger, slimmer, artier versions of the Two Fat Ladies. ‘Jo can talk about Liz Frink’s work until the cows come home,’ Sarah informs us at one point before warning Jo: ‘You’re going to have to convince

I guess that few would currently dispute that the world is in crisis. I’m not talking about Covid-19. Nor am I primarily addressing the issues arising from the 36 billion tonnes of carbon that the human project sends into our atmosphere every year. Climate chaos is a part of the issue, but I’m thinking principally of those things that most impact upon the biosphere as an ongoing live enterprise. They include the additional billion humans that our planet acquires every 12 years; the four-fifths of fish populations harvested to or beyond sustainable levels; the half of all the world’s trees felled by our species; the catastrophic depletion of soils by