Consisting of four interlinking sections, this exhibition begins with highlights of the Walker's holdings of pedestal sculpture, featuring the museum's earliest three-dimensional work, Auguste Rodin's Le Baiser du Fantôme à la Jeune Fille (Phantom Kissing a Young Girl), c. 1895 and including variety of other European, figurative works such as Picasso's Le Fou (The Jester), 1905, Maillol's Study for La Meditterané, 1905, and Renoir's Le Forgeron (The Blacksmith), 1916. This section focuses on modes of display and the use of sculpture as a contemplative object. This investigation of the evolution of pedestal-bound sculpture will continue to the present with contemporary interpretations by artists such as Sherrie Levine, Claes Oldenburg, Thomas Schütte, and Dorit Cypis.

The second section will be devoted primarily to the continuing influence of conceptual and minimal art in terms of presenting the object in space and establishing a relational situation with the viewer. Key works by Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, Marisa Merz, and Robert Smithson will be seen alongside younger and mid-career artists, such as Robert Gober, Damien Hirst, Rirkrit Tiravanija, and Rachel Whiteread, whose practice would be impossible to contextualize without the radical re-thinking of sculpture by those who preceded them.

This investigation of sculpture will be continued in the third section of the exhibition which focuses on the increasing level of public engagement with the sculptural artwork and the radical questioning of the accepted norms of artistic subject matter. It is here that sculpture becomes something which operates outside the aesthetic realm and enters the social - alternately functioning as a commemorative monument, a historical marker, a social commentary, and a media critique. In works by Keith Piper, Hachivi Edgar Heap of Birds, Glenn Ligon and Byron Kim, Mike Kelley, Gary Simmons, Jana Sterbak, and Matthew Barney, the sculptural medium opens up to encompass found objects and detritus, decaying flesh, text, and the pixelated image of television and video.

The fourth essential element of the exhibition will be Sculpture on Site, a series of three sequential commissioned works to be constructed in the Walker galleries by Minnesota sculptors Dorit Cypis, Robert Fischer, and Chris Larson who are involved in issues pertaining to identity, shelter, and mobility at the end of this century. Sculpture on Site reinforces Walker's longstanding commitment to living artists, regional artistic growth, and the responsibility of the institution as a commissioning agent. The format, in which the work site will, as much as possible, be open to and viewable by the public, is intended to further enhance the public's understanding of both sculptural practice and the role art can play in society. Artists will start working in Gallery A from May 3 through November 15.

Curator: Richard Flood