With a big subject you need a big space, and there's no doubt 22 rooms and two floors of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art qualifies.
Whether even that's large enough for a "definitive" survey of 110 years of sculpture is debatable.
Still, there's no faulting the ambition of gallery director Simon Groom and his team. Though the 150 or so works are drawn largely from the national collection, they've assembled a roster which includes most of the giants of the sculptural form, from Auguste Rodin and Alberto Giacometti to Henry Moore and Ron Mueck.
Absent are Constantin Brancusi, Anthony Caro, Richard Serra, Jeff Koons and Louise Bourgeois, but there's wow factor in pieces by Pablo Picasso and Man Ray which (more or less) speak to the subject. Their contributions, both collages, are the first thing the visitor sees.
The rooms run in a loosely chronological fashion, so we learn how sculptors accommodated first Impressionism and then Cubism into their art; how Barbara Hepworth and her husband Ben Nicholson were inspired by nature during their time living in St Ives; what was happening in Germany between the wars; what happened in Britain after 1945; what happened when sculpture stopped trying to be analogous to painting (are you still with me?); and how new -isms changed how sculptors viewed their practice, their materials and the scope of their duties.
On that note, visitors will be struck by how much there is here that isn't traditional sculpture – Sol LeWitt's psychedelic Wall Drawing #1136, for instance, in which nine curving lines in primary colours intersect 149 vertical ones which have been hand-painted on three walls of an upstairs room. Sure, it suggests movement and depth, but it's palpably two-dimensional. So too are the six works in Michelangelo Pistoletto's Lavoro series, mirrors which in part reflect the image of the viewer.
Meanwhile, placed next to Charles Jencks's Landform outside, is a piece of what might you might call conceptual sculpture – two jet engines from an old US spy plane in which 2009 Turner nominee Roger Hiorns has embedded a variety of psychotropic drugs. It's called Untitled.
There are a dozen or so star pieces. Ron Mueck's massive A Girl, actually a facsimile in fibreglass and silicon of a new-born, dominates th e central hall. There's also a return for Duane Hanson's Tourists, Henry Moore's The Helmet and John de Andrea's Model In Repose, and there's a star in the making in John Davies's For The Last Time. First shown in 1972, it's a collection of four mannequins. Three are masked, all are suited. One directs two of them to crawl menacingly towards the fourth, who sits on a chair staring into a looking glass. It's like something out of a Japanese horror film, and the beauty of it is Davies intended the figures to be arranged any way the curator wished. So the "story" changes every time.
Among the other big draws are Rodin's gnarled bronzes (all from the 1890s) and Barbara Hepworth's 1949 work, Dyad. Tall and smooth, pocked with enigmatic cutaways and apertures, it's carved from a piece of Himalyan rosewood.
Both pieces have the sort of awesome, elemental heft we expect from sculpture but if it's the really muscular stuff you like, it doesn't come any mightier than Jacob Epstein's Consummatum Est. Carved from alabaster, it shows a reclining Christ-like figure and is about the length of one of Hiorns's jet engines.
The show has a lot more to tell us besides. About how, for instance, in this macho artform, there have been a number of females: Elisabeth Frink, Margaret Mellis, Rachel Whiteread, Sarah Lucas and Hepworth herself, to name just five. About how religious subjects largely dropped out of the picture in the 20th century. And about how British sculpture from the 1930s onwards had as much depth, vitality and playfulness as its painterly counterpart. So visitors can learn about Victor Pasmore and the London Constructionist Group; about Reg Butler, architect-turned-blacksmith-turned-sculptor; about New Yorker Nancy Grosman and her extraordinary 1968 piece, Head. Its construction materials are billed as "leather, studs, nails and epoxy resin over wood" – curator-speak for "creepy-looking gimp mask".
With Martin Boyce, a Scottish sculptor, having won the 2011 Turner Prize, there couldn't be a better time for this show. The single Boyce sculpture here is slight, but no matter. Along with the other works on show – by Ian Hamilton Finlay, Bruce McLean, Eduardo Paolozzi, David Shrigley, Jim Lambie, Simon Starling, Douglas Gordon and his fellow Turner nominee, Karla Black – he at least ensures that we have a seat at this monumental table.
The Sculpture Show: 1900-2012 is at the Scottish National Gallery Of Modern Art until June 24
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