Sculpture
Safer's earliest sculptures in the 1950s and 1960s were small works of Lucite. Over time he also began to work in bronze and stainless steel. The pieces became larger and in 1979 his first public commission, Judgment, a multi-ton patinated bronze, was installed at Harvard Law School in Cambridge,Massachusetts.
This was the first in a long string of public installations.
As the commissions grew in number they grew in size as well. Interplay, created in 1987, is 18 feet (5.5 m) high. Leading Edge, created in 1989, is 20 feet (6.1 m) high. His hallmark work, Ascent, which stands at the entrance of the Smithsonian Institution's Udvar-Hazy Center at Dulles Airport in Virginia, is 75 feet (23 m) high.
"Through his work, John has tried to capture the essence … and reduce the subject to the pure line in space that Aristotle believed to be the basis of sculpture."
Read more about this topic: John Safer
Famous quotes containing the word sculpture:
“I look on Sculpture as history. I do not think the Apollo and the Jove impossible in flesh and blood. Every trait the artist recorded in stone, he had seen in life, and better than his copy.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“There are men whose manners have the same essential splendor as the simple and awful sculpture on the friezes of the Parthenon, and the remains of the earliest Greek art.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Ah, to build, to build!
That is the noblest art of all the arts.
Painting and sculpture are but images,
Are merely shadows cast by outward things
On stone or canvas, having in themselves
No separate existence. Architecture,
Existing in itself, and not in seeming
A something it is not, surpasses them
As substance shadow.”
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882)