Metal sculpture

There are two families of metals: ferrous and non ferrous. All ferrous metals contain iron. Non ferrous metals include aluminium, zinc and copper and its alloys, for example bronze.

Metals can be hammered without breaking or cracking them in order to shape them, they can also be melted and used in moulds or made into wire and modelled - this makes them ideal media for sculptors to work with.

The use of bronze for making cast sculpture is very ancient, and bronze is perhaps the metal most traditionally thought of as a sculptural medium.

From the early twentieth century, however, artists such as Pablo Picasso and the Russian constructivists began to explore the use of other metals, and Julio González introduced welded metal sculpture. The use of a range of metals and of industrial making techniques became widespread in minimal art and new generation sculpture for example. © Art Term | Tate

Bronze and related copper alloys are the oldest and still the most popular metals for cast metal sculptures; a cast bronze sculpture is often called simply a "bronze".

Common bronze alloys have the unusual and desirable property of expanding slightly just before they set, thus filling the finest details of a mould. Their strength and lack of brittleness (ductility) is an advantage when figures in action are to be created, especially when compared to various ceramic or stone materials (see marble sculpture for several examples).

Gold is the softest and most precious metal, and very important in jewellery; with silver it is soft enough to be worked with hammers and other tools as well as cast; repoussé and chasing are among the techniques used in gold and silversmithing.

Casting is a group of manufacturing processes by which a liquid material (bronze, copper, glass, aluminum, iron) is (usually) poured into a mould, which contains a hollow cavity of the desired shape, and then allowed to solidify.

The solid casting is then ejected or broken out to complete the process, although a final stage of "cold work" may follow on the finished cast. Casting may be used to form hot liquid metals or various materials that cold set after mixing of components (such as epoxies, concrete, plaster and clay).

Casting is most often used for making complex shapes that would be otherwise difficult or uneconomical to make by other methods. The oldest surviving casting is a copper Mesopotamian frog from 3200 BCE.

Specific techniques include lost-wax casting, plaster mould casting and sand casting.

Welding is a process where different pieces of metal are fused together to create different shapes and designs. There are many different forms of welding, such as Oxy-fuel welding, Stick welding, MIG welding, and TIG welding.

Oxy-fuel is probably the most common method of welding when it comes to creating steel sculptures because it is the easiest to use for shaping the steel as well as making clean and less noticeable joins of the steel.

The key to Oxy-fuel welding is heating each piece of metal to be joined evenly until all are red and have a shine to them. Once that shine is on each piece, that shine will soon become a 'pool' where the metal is liquified and the welder must get the pools to join, fusing the metal.

Once cooled off, the location where the pools joined are now one continuous piece of metal.

Also used heavily in Oxy-fuel sculpture creation is forging. Forging is the process of heating metal to a certain point to soften it enough to be shaped into different forms.

One very common example is heating the end of a steel rod and hitting the red heated tip with a hammer while on an anvil to form a point. In between hammer swings, the forger rotates the rod and gradually forms a sharpened point from the blunt end of a steel rod. | Source: © Wikipedia

Esistono due famiglie di metalli: ferrosi e non ferrosi. Tutti i metalli ferrosi contengono ferro. I metalli non ferrosi comprendono alluminio, zinco e rame e le sue leghe, ad esempio il bronzo.

I metalli possono essere martellati senza romperli o spezzarli per modellarli, possono anche essere fusi ed utilizzati negli stampi o trasformati in fili e modellarli - questo li rende un supporto ideale con cui lavorare per gli scultori.

L'uso del bronzo per realizzare la scultura è molto antico, e il bronzo è forse il metallo più tradizionalmente pensato come mezzo scultoreo.

Dall'inizio del XX secolo, tuttavia, artisti come Pablo Picasso e i costruttivisti russi iniziarono a esplorare l'uso di altri metalli, e Julio González introdusse la scultura in metallo saldato.

L'uso di una gamma di metalli e di tecniche di fabbricazione industriale è diventato molto diffuso nell'arte minimale e nella scultura di nuova generazione, ad esempio. | © Art Term | Tate