Composing the Space: Sculpture in the Avant-Garde - A Reader / Anthology

An illustrated anthology of key statements on modernist avant-garde sculpture and its vision of space, movement and the body, from Kobro, Tatlin, Arp, Schlemmer and more

Guided in part by the concerns of Polish sculptor Katarzyna Kobro, Composing the Space looks at avant-garde sculpture’s dialogues with various conceptions of space, movement and the human body. Kobro’s artistic experiments are presented in the context of comparable sculptural endeavors by artists such as Naum Gabo, Friedrich Kiesler and El Lissitzky. In Kobro’s view, the dynamism of our motor skills should be counterbalanced with a carefully measured and organized sequence of plastic (sculptural, architectural) rhythms unfolding in both time and space.

According to Kobro, sculpture was becoming a model of the new order to be introduced in our immediate environment, based on a psychophysical coordination of human beings leading to a rationalized and purposeful construction of the space of everyday life. Included here are texts by Naum Gabo, Barbara Hepworth, Katarzyna Kobro, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Vladimir Tatlin and Georges Vantongerloo, alongside critical commentary by Yve-Alain Bois, Carola Giedion-Welcker, Rosalind Krauss, Megan Luke and Alex Potts.