Some sculptures do more than stand in a square. They trick the eye, appear to sink into the pavement, hang in the air or seem to climb forever. Fifteen works stand out for the way they play with perception and space, from Lorenzo Quinn's giant hands in Venice and Jerzy Kalina's sinking pedestrians in Wrocław to Andy Scott's Kelpies in Scotland, Louise Bourgeois's spider Maman and César's giant thumb in Paris.
Each work uses a different trick. Some rely on scale, making an ordinary object, such as a thumb, a hand or a spider, so big that the surroundings shrink around it. Some use absence: missing torsos, hidden heads or figures half swallowed by the ground. Others depend on where you stand, so the illusion only works from one angle. Below you will find what each piece is, who made it, where to see it and why it fools the eye. Several of the Instagram posts that once illustrated this list have since been removed by their authors, but the works themselves are well documented.
Why some sculptures play tricks on us
Our brains judge size and distance using clues: the size of familiar objects, the height of the horizon, overlapping shapes and the way details fade with distance. Sculptors who play with perception deliberately break one of these clues.
- Scale shock. A familiar object enlarged a hundred times, like a thumb or a hand, makes buildings and people look smaller than they are.
- Forced perspective. Steps or lines that shrink faster than expected make an object seem longer or taller than it really is.
- Missing parts. When a body has a hole where the torso should be, the brain fills in the gap and the empty space becomes part of the sculpture.
- Context. A figure placed in a canal, on a pavement or among trees borrows meaning from its setting. The same bronze in a gallery would feel quite different.
Photographs flatten these effects because they choose one viewpoint for you. In person, walking around a piece is often half the experience.
Giants in public space
Support, Lorenzo Quinn (Venice)
© lorenzoquinnartist / Instagram © lorenzoquinnartist / Instagram
For the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017, Italian sculptor Lorenzo Quinn made Support, two enormous white hands rising from the Grand Canal to prop up the wall of the Ca' Sagredo Hotel. The work was a warning about climate change and rising seas, which threaten Venice more than almost any other city. It was cast by the lost-wax method in Quinn's Barcelona studio and stayed on show from May to November 2017 and was later removed, although Quinn had hoped it could stay in the city.
Force of Nature, Lorenzo Quinn
(The Instagram post originally embedded here is no longer available.)
In Quinn's Force of Nature series, a woman, usually read as Mother Nature, appears to spin the Earth inside a swirl of fabric while wind sweeps her hair and clothes behind her. The balance looks impossible because the whole weight seems to rest on a single point of drapery. Versions of the work have been shown in England, the United States, Monaco and Singapore.
The Kelpies, Andy Scott (Falkirk, Scotland)
Andy Scott's twin horse heads stand 30 metres (98 feet) tall beside the Forth and Clyde Canal between Falkirk and Grangemouth. Each weighs about 300 tonnes and is built from structural steel clad in stainless steel. Kelpies are shape-shifting water spirits from Scottish folklore, but the sculptures also honour the heavy Clydesdale horses that once towed barges and worked Scotland's farms and industry. They were completed in 2013 and officially unveiled in April 2014, and they are lit up after dark, as in this night view.
Maman, Louise Bourgeois (Bilbao)
(The Instagram post originally embedded here is no longer available.)
Louise Bourgeois created Maman, French for "mother", in 1999. The spider is about 9 metres high and carries a sac holding 32 marble eggs. Bourgeois dedicated it to her mother, who repaired tapestries in the family workshop in Paris; to the artist the spider stood for weaving, patience and protection rather than fear. The original is steel, and six bronze casts followed; one stands outside the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, and others are in Ottawa, Tokyo, Seoul, Doha and Kansas City.
Le Pouce, César Baldaccini (Paris)
French sculptor César first enlarged his own thumb for a 1965 exhibition on the theme of the hand. The giant version in the La Défense business district is about 12 metres (40 feet) tall and weighs around 18 tonnes, made of polished and varnished bronze. Seen next to office towers, the fingerprint ridges become as big as paving stones, a classic case of scale changing how we read an ordinary body part.
Looking Up, Tom Friedman (Austin, Texas)
(The Instagram post originally embedded here is no longer available.)
Tom Friedman's Looking Up is a figure about 33 feet (10 metres) tall gazing at the sky. Friedman built the model from crushed aluminium-foil roasting pans, then had it cast in polished stainless steel, so the giant still carries the dents and creases of kitchen foil. The Contemporary Austin acquired it in 2015 for its Betty and Edward Marcus Sculpture Park at Laguna Gloria.
Primavera, Rafael San Juan (Havana)
Cuban sculptor and professor Rafael San Juan made Primavera (Spring) for the 2015 Havana Biennial. The woman's head is about 8 metres tall and made from roughly two tons of recycled steel scrap. San Juan drew on dancers from Cuba's National Ballet and blended several faces into one. She wears a crown of flowers and looks out to sea from the corner of Galiano and the Malecón, a tribute to the strength of Cuban women.
Walking, Wei Wang (Bondi, Australia)
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Sculpture by the Sea, held each year on the coastal walk from Bondi to Tamarama in Sydney, is one of the world's largest free outdoor sculpture exhibitions. A large work titled Walking, credited to Wei Wang, was reportedly shown there; we could not confirm the year or details. Setting art against open sea and sandstone cliffs is part of the festival's appeal, as the landscape changes the scale of every piece.
Bodies that vanish or break through the ground
Les Voyageurs, Bruno Catalano
(The Instagram post originally embedded here is no longer available.)
French sculptor Bruno Catalano, born in Morocco in 1960 to a Sicilian family, worked as a sailor before turning to art. His life-size bronze Travellers each carry a suitcase, yet large parts of their bodies are simply missing, so you can see the street through their chests. Ten of them lined the Marseille waterfront in 2013, when the city was European Capital of Culture. The gaps suggest what people leave behind when they move, an idea rooted in Catalano's own experience of migration.
Passage, Jerzy Kalina (Wrocław)
(The Instagram post originally embedded here is no longer available.)
Jerzy Kalina's Przejście (Passage) shows 14 life-size bronze pedestrians, seven on each side of Świdnicka Street. On one side they sink into the pavement; on the other they rise out of it again. The idea began as a temporary installation in Warsaw in 1977, and the bronze version was unveiled in December 2005 on the 24th anniversary of martial law in Poland. It is usually read as a memorial to people who were arrested, killed or disappeared during martial law (1981 to 1983), and to the society that resurfaced afterwards.
The Unknown Bureaucrat, Magnús Tómasson (Reykjavík)
Icelandic artist Magnús Tómasson's 1994 sculpture shows a man in a suit and coat, briefcase in hand, whose head and upper body are swallowed by a large slab of rough basalt. It stands near Reykjavík City Hall by the city's pond. Is it a tribute to anonymous civil servants or gentle satire about faceless bureaucracy? The sculpture leaves that question open.
Illusions of height and lightness
Karma, Do Ho Suh (New Orleans)
Korean artist Do Ho Suh's Karma is a column of crouching men, each covering the eyes of the man below, rising about 7 metres into the air. Made of brushed stainless steel, it stands in the Sydney and Walda Besthoff Sculpture Garden at the New Orleans Museum of Art, which dates it to 2011. Viewers often read it as generations of ancestors, each carrying the next without being able to see where they are going.
Diminish and Ascend, David McCracken (Bondi)
Shown at Sculpture by the Sea in Bondi in 2013, David McCracken's aluminium staircase gets narrower and shallower with each step. Our eyes assume all the steps are the same size, so the shrinking treads read as distance, and the stairs appear to climb endlessly into the sky. From the side, the illusion collapses, which is exactly why people walk round and round it.
Fairy sculptures, Robin Wight (Fantasy Wire)
British sculptor Robin Wight, who works as Fantasy Wire, builds life-size fairies and dandelion seed heads from steel wire. Seen against the sky or among trees, the open lattice almost disappears, so heavy metal figures look as if they could blow away. His dandelion pieces are made so that the "seeds" appear to drift off in the wind.
Heart of Trees, Jaume Plensa
Spanish artist Jaume Plensa's Heart of Trees (2007) consists of seated bronze figures that wrap their arms and legs around living trees. The bodies are covered in names of composers, like tattoos. As the trees grow, the relationship between figure and tree slowly changes, so the work is never quite finished. The post above shows Plensa's work exhibited at MACBA in Barcelona; versions of Heart of Trees have been installed in several countries, including Umedalen Sculpture Park in Sweden.
How to get the most out of visiting these works
- Walk the full circle. Works such as Diminish and Ascend and Karma change completely when you move a few metres.
- Visit at different times. The Kelpies and Le Pouce look very different at dusk, in sun and under floodlights.
- Check before you travel. Temporary works, such as Quinn's Support and many Sculpture by the Sea entries, are removed after the show. Permanent pieces like Passage, The Unknown Bureaucrat, Maman in Bilbao and Looking Up are free to see.
- Read the context. Knowing that Passage is about martial law or that Maman is about a mother turns a clever illusion into a story.
The best perception-bending sculptures do more than surprise you. They make you notice how quickly the brain fills in gaps and how much meaning comes from the place where a work stands.
Sources: Public Delivery: Lorenzo Quinn's hands in Venice; My Modern Met: Force of Nature; Wikipedia: The Kelpies; Wikipedia: Maman; Paris La Défense: Le Pouce; The Contemporary Austin: Looking Up; My Modern Met: Primavera; DailyArt Magazine: Bruno Catalano; Atlas Obscura: Passage; Atlas Obscura: Monument to the Unknown Bureaucrat; New Orleans Museum of Art: Karma; My Modern Met: Diminish and Ascend; Umedalen Skulptur: Heart of Trees. Original list via Bright Side; Instagram posts by the photographers named in each embed.
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