Art Enters the Third Dimension

The Art Newspaper
by Julia Halperin

July 23, 2013

Three-dimensional printing enables artists to realise sculptures in previously impractical shapes and sizes. The technology creates 3-D objects from digital models by printing thousands of successive layers of material. The artist Frank Stella was an early adopter. In the mid-2000s, he used a 3-D printer to produce metal and resin segments for his spiraling polychrome sculpture series “Scarlatti Kirkpatrck”. The technology gave Stella “an opportunity to project work out from the wall in a way that would have been difficult, and too heavy, using traditional means”, says Ron Labaco, a curator at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York. He will include Stella’s work in an exhibition devoted to computer-enabled work, “Out of Hand: Materialising the Postdigital”, which is scheduled to open on 14 October.

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