Wall Sculpture and Installation

About

Walls have always carried more than flat pictures: carved reliefs, mosaics, hung textiles, trophies. Wall sculpture in the modern sense grew in the early 20th century. Vladimir Tatlin's Corner Counter-Relief (1914–15) stretched metal and wood across the angle of a room, and Jean Arp and Kurt Schwitters mounted cut wood and assembled objects on the wall.

From the 1960s the field multiplied. Donald Judd fixed identical boxes one above another in vertical stacks, and Richard Tuttle's Wire Pieces (1972) combine pencil line, pinned wire and its shadow. Frank Stella's paintings grew into layered, built-out reliefs in the 1970s. Chakaia Booker cuts and twists discarded tyres into dense, projecting forms, and Leonardo Drew assembles rusted, burnt and weathered materials into wall-spanning grids. Look at how a work is fixed, its hanging points, its shadow and its distance from the wall, which change how it reads from the front and side.