Oliveira builds sculptures and installations that combine human-made materials with biomorphic forms. His work often challenges the clean-lined, concrete boxes of modernist architecture — Oliveira’s arboreal mutants crash through museum walls and spill on to gallery floors.
Hirst employs the bodies of animals in aestheticized, natural-history museum-esque installations. In the ’90s, he installations featured the carcasses of wild and domesticated animals in large tanks of formaldehyde. He also created paintings and sculptures with the remains of insects and arachnids.
The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, 1991
The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths, 2006
Judecca, 2012
See Hirst’s website.
Goldsworthy creates ephemeral sculptures using materials he finds outdoors — leaves, stones, twigs, wood, soil, snow, and ice transform into aesthetic forms. Many of his creations are dismantled by the elements; dispersed by the wind or disassembled by rising tides.
Goldsworthy documents his temporary creations with photographs. He states, “Each work grows, stays, decays – integral parts of a cycle which the photograph shows at its heights, marking the moment when the work is most alive….Process and decay are implicit.”
See Goldsworthy’s wikipedia entry.
The film Rivers and Tides documents Goldsworthy’s approach to creating natural sculptures.
The common SENSE, 2014
Hamilton scans a selection of animal specimens from the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture to create a memento-mori bestiary. The scans are cropped and printed on newsprint pads that let visitors tear off a favorite print and take it with them. Hamilton describes the work as “an address to the finitude and threatened extinctions we share across species—a lacrimosa, an elegy, for a future being lost.”
Read more about the exhibit here.
Sunbathers, 2000
Ackroyd and Harvey expose panels of grass to different levels of light to create grass paintings.
Impermanence, 2012
Oh creates altered photographs by adding microbes to the water used to develop his film. The microbes “consume light-sensitive chemicals over the course of months or years” and alter the photographic images.
See Oh’s website.