The Sculpture Gallery

Have any of you heard of biodegradable art? I have. Now I'm going to blog about it :-)
Dieter Roth, a sculptor from Iceland used to have a unique way of creating his sculpted works. Interestingly enough, he fueled a curiosity for his "recycled media", by way of being different from your run of the mill sculptor. Roth was sometimes known as "Dieter Rot" because of his creations that made use of biodegradable media. Pictured below is one sculpture you may find a bit strange, yet curiously befuddled by.

The title of this work is "Rabbit Shit Rabbit" from 1972. He also made 250 editions of this piece as well. Don't be fooled though by the comedic title, Roth's many other works were also taken in very impressively by his peers. Today there's a congregation every year that remembers Roth called the Dieter Roth Academy. It has been done in Iceland, China, Germany (twice) and the Netherlands. His many friends such as Henriette van Egten, Bjorn Roth, and Andrea Tippel are among the attendees.

Even if Roth isn't with us today, his novelty of an artform still draws crowds to wonder at their ingenious, yet unorthodox existence. It just goes to show you, art is all about expression and creativity, the media is just something that follows.

I'm pretty sure there have been a lot of artists out there with a curiosity for organic pigments and media, but today I chanced upon Han Bing Lin's unique usage of fish-bone in his Asian inspired relief art. Aside from fish bones, the artist also uses related marine organics like gills, scales and even the antenae of shrimps and crustaceans. Lin's inspiration came from an old story he tells from 1998. He was inspired by the sight of a young girl in a white dress playing the violin. Where did he see her? After his meal while staring at the unique arrangement of fishbones!

Based in Xiamen, China, Lin spent over three years collecting fishbones and materials he would be able to incorporate into his artworks. His uniqueness cost him over thirty thousand yuan before any outside help managed to discover the beauty of his creative mind. Among his subjects are bold and fascinating landscapes, many of which drawn from his hometown's natural surroundings.



It's something you don't see every day; a form of art that makes use of what was previously conceived as unusable. This movement of art carries on from before the twentieth century into new exciting techniques that slowly make their way into Asian museums and galleries.

A cum laude graduate from the Technical University Delft, Lars Spuybroek is a multi-awarded organic artist that produces works of architectural monuments in clearly modern deviance. Spuybroek started his career in the international architecture community when he unveiled his creation; "water pavilion" on the island of Neeltje Jans. The building was built using two halves as the main composition and made use of silvery material to simulate a sense of a freshwater element in the design. The artistic building was the first of many of Spuybroek's renowned creations, allowing visitors to interact with the interior using transformable lights and sounds. Spuybroek took pride in the structure's fluid and continuous geometrical elements, making sure that the floors, walls and ceilings would meld into a whole body instead of being rigidly joint like normal rooms often are.

His work in the Netherlands, the "D-tower" is a bright red interactive structure symbolizing the dominant placement of love in our psychological set of emotions. Despite many of his out-of-this-world designs, Spuybroek consistently rejects a connection to futurism. He prides himself on the delicate bodily forms of every creation in their own unique style, and also hopes that the ability of mass customization will be available to many societies. This concept entails the majority-spreading of unique designs into our population instead of the current mass-produced routine designs that come from standard factories.

Spuybroek was a recipient of the Archiprix award and the Iakov Chernikov Award for his outstanding understanding of both art and architecture. He was also a well-known teacher at established institutions like the University of Kassel in Germany and the Columbia University in New York City.