Modern sculpture: from mass to space

Traditional sculpture has two ways of working: carving, which removes material, and modelling, which adds it, as with clay; a modelled form may then be cast in metal. In the early 20th century the Cubists assembled works from different materials, and construction became a new way of making sculpture. In 1920 Naum Gabo, with his brother Antoine Pevsner, published the Realistic Manifesto in Moscow, calling for an art freed from volume and mass and grounded in space and time. Sculpture since then has used industrial materials such as steel, acrylic, and glass; some works move (kinetic sculpture), and some take light as their material. In Japan, too, postwar abstract sculpture turned away from academic figurative work that prized mass and stability, toward space and the environment.

Walk once around the work, and look from a different height. With surfaces that reflect or let light through, watch how the work changes with where you stand and with the light in the room; with open or linear forms, look at the shape of the space that passes through them.

Where does this work end: where the material stops, or at the edge of the space it reaches?