Background
The characteristics which lend any type of art to being postmodern can be applied to sculptural works. These characteristics include bricolage, collage, appropriation, the recycling of past styles and themes in a modern-day context, as well as the break-up of the barriers between fine arts, craft and popular culture. While inherently difficult to define by nature, we can say that postmodernism began with pop art and continued within many following movements including conceptual art, neo-expressionism, feminist art, and the Young British Artists of the 1990s. The plurality of idea and form that postmodernism is defined by essentially allows any art to be considered postmodern. In terms of sculptural practice, mediums like intermedia, installation art, conceptual art, video light art and sound art are often regarded as postmodern by nature.
Pop Art
Pop art is an art movement that emerged in the mid-1950s in Britain and the late 1950s in the United States that many e. Among the early artists that shaped the pop art movement were Eduardo Paolozzi and Richard Hamilton in Britain, and Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns in the United States. Pop art presented a challenge to traditions of fine art by including imagery from popular culture such as advertising and news.
Typewriter Eraser by Claes Oldenburg, 1999
Claes Oldenburg is known for memorializing everyday objects in his works, challenging the idea that public monuments must commemorate historical figures or events.
Jeff Koons
Jeffrey "Jeff" Koons (born January 21, 1955) is an American artist known for working with popular culture subjects and his reproductions of banal objects—such as balloon animals produced in stainless steel with mirror-finish surfaces. His works have sold for substantial sums, including at least one world record auction price for a work by a living artist.
Koons gained recognition in the 1980s and subsequently set up a factory-like studio in a SoHo loft on the corner of Houston Street and Broadway in New York. It was staffed with over 30 assistants, each assigned to a different aspect of producing his work—in a similar mode as Andy Warhol's Factory (notable because all of his work is produced using a method known as art fabrication). Today, he has a 1,500 m2 (16,000 sq ft) factory near the old Hudson rail yards in Chelsea, working with 90 to 120[18] regular assistants. Koons developed a color-by-numbers system, so that each of his assistants could execute his canvases and sculptures as if they had been done "by a single hand".
Balloon Dog (Magenta), Jeff Koons, 1994–2000
One of five unique versions (Blue, Magenta, Orange, Red, Yellow). Made from mirror-polished stainless steel with transparent color coating, the Orange version was sold in 2013 for a record price for a living sculptor.
Koons is a good example of a postmodern sculptor due to the fact that his works elevate the mundane, contain a heavy dose of kitsch, and because his self marketing techniques and subsequent success project an element of ambiguous cynicism that is often seen in postmodern works.
The "Puppy" topiary sculpture by Jeff Koons, on the outdoor terrace at Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Spain.
Koons' "Puppy" presents a large scale puppy on the terrace of the Guggenheim, Bilbao.