Environmental art is a range of artistic practices encompassing both historical approaches to nature in art and more recent ecological and politically motivated types of works. Environmental art has evolved away from formal concerns, for example monumental earthworks using earth as a sculptural material, towards a deeper relationship to systems, processes and phenomena in relationship to social concerns. Integrated social and ecological approaches developed as an ethical, restorative stance emerged in the 1990s. Over the past ten years environmental art has become a focal point of exhibitions around the world as the social and cultural aspects of climate change come to the forefront.
Marco Casagrande, Sandworm, Beaufort04 Triennial of Contemporary Art, Wenduine, Belgium, 2012
Claude Monet, Waterloo Bridge, London
Diane Burko, Waters Glacier and Bucks, 2013
Robert Morris, Observatorium, Netherlands
Sculpture is the branch of the visual arts that operates in three dimensions. Sculpture is the three-dimensional art work which is physically presented in the dimensions of height, width and depth. It is one of the plastic arts. Durable sculptural processes originally used carving and modelling, in stone, metal, ceramics, wood and other materials but, since Modernism, there has been almost complete freedom of materials and process. A wide variety of materials may be worked by removal such as carving, assembled by welding or modelling, or moulded or cast.
Venus of Hohle Fels, Germany, oldest known sculpture of a human being, 42.000–40.000 BP
Dying Gaul, or The Capitoline Gaul, a Roman marble copy of a Hellenistic work of the late 3rd century BCE, Capitoline Museums, Rome
Assyrian lamassu gate guardian from Khorsabad, c. 800–721 BCE
Michelangelo's Moses, (c. 1513–1515), San Pietro in Vincoli, Rome, for the tomb of Pope Julius II