Vitamin 3-D

Vitamin 3-D: New Perspectives in Sculpture and Installation is an up-to-the-minute survey of current global developments in contemporary sculpture and its close relative, installation. This vast medium of sculpture continues to be a central pillar of artistic practice, and Vitamin 3-D presents the outstanding artists who are engaging with and pushing the boundaries of the medium.

Vitamin 3-D follows the success of Vitamin P: New Perspectives in Painting, Vitamin D: New Perspectives in Drawing and Vitamin Ph: New Perspectives in Photography, presenting a cross-generational survey of contemporary artists from 27 countries. Chosen from more than 500 nominations by significant international critics, curators, art historians and creative writers, Vitamin 3-D’s 117 established and emerging artists were selected on the basis that they have made a significant contribution to sculpture and installation (in their broadest sense) in the last five years.

Vitamin 3-D allows the reader to look at the medium in detail, to study sculpture’s unique properties in relation to itself, in relation to contemporary art and in relation to the world at large. An ongoing fascination with the key issues of modern sculpture, from the readymade to the specific object, today drives many artists to return to those issues again and again, with fresh and often surprising results.

In her evocative introductory essay for Vitamin 3-D, Anne Ellegood uses Rosalind Krauss’s landmark 1978 essay ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’ as the basis to explore the wildly inclusive breadth and depth of work that the term ‘sculpture’ can now be applied to within contemporary practice – and the key historical moments that serve as the precedents for what we now understand as both sculpture and installation.

Sculpture continues to strike out into new territory, harnessing the medium to confront today’s commodity world in its own materials or conjuring visionary new objects and environments like nothing seen before. Vitamin 3-D contributes to these international debates on contemporary sculpture and installation while providing an accessible overview and a concise reference book in an innovative design that embodies the materiality of its subject.