Soft, Fragile, Divine: The Beauty of Contemporary Sculpture

Feature image: Petrit Halilaj via Fondazione Merz

For centuries, sculpture has been defined by its weight. From marble gods to steel giants, the medium traditionally spoke the language of permanence and monumentality. But in recent years, a quiet revolution has taken hold. Today’s most intriguing sculptors embrace softness, fragility, and ephemeral materials, such as wax, porcelain, fabric, thread, sugar, and even human hair. Their works seem to melt, shimmer, or sigh, evoking something dreamlike, divine, and emotionally alive.

This shift is not just aesthetic. It reflects a broader cultural movement, one that favors intimacy over domination, vulnerability over spectacle. These sculptures often look like they might crumble if touched, yet they hold immense power.

In this piece, we spotlight four visionary artists. Marguerite Humeau, Petrit Halilaj, Lynda Benglis, and David Altmejd, who are redefining sculpture through sensuous materiality and otherworldly poetics.

French artist Marguerite Humeau resurrects entire mythologies. Her works often feel like relics from a parallel dimension, or ceremonial artifacts belonging to creatures not yet named. Combining ancient narratives with speculative fiction and biological research, Humeau’s sculptures blur the line between science and mysticism.

Her preferred materials are wax, resin, and silk, and are chosen for their visceral presence and lifelike delicacy. In her Birth Canal series, for instance, Humeau creates towering feminine forms that seem embalmed in a thick skin of paraffin wax. They appear sacred and medical at once: towering fertility goddesses or embryonic tombs.

In FOXP2 (2016), titled after the gene believed to enable human speech, she created a necropolis of ghostly, animalistic forms—hybrid sculptures suspended between life and extinction.

Her work exists in a space where technology meets tenderness, where synthetic materials give rise to mystical reverence. It’s a sculpture that hums rather than shouts.

Kosovar artist Petrit Halilaj transforms personal and collective memory into delicately constructed installations using fabric, thread, wood, and wire. Much of his work deals with the lingering wounds of war and displacement, drawing from his childhood experiences during the Kosovo War and his family's life as refugees.

His practice is deeply collaborative. He often works with his partner, artist Alvaro Urbano, and includes family members in his installations and performances. In Shkrepëtima (2018), he staged a theater production in the ruins of a Kosovo cultural center, blending local history with imagined myth.

Through soft, suspended materials, Halilaj’s sculptures are both homes and habitats. They evoke the sensation of returning, if only in dreams.

In the 1960s and ’70s, Lynda Benglis broke the sculptural mold. While male Minimalists were pursuing rigidity and austerity, Benglis was pouring latex, wax, and polyurethane foam directly onto the floor. Her work was chaotic, dripping, molten. It was also defiantly bodily and sensual.

Benglis’ early wax pieces subverted the idea of sculpture as a cold, controlled medium. Instead, they oozed, shimmered, and collapsed, drawing comparisons to flesh, sexual organs, and molten lava. The work challenged not only aesthetics, but also gender roles in the art world.

In Contraband (1969), poured pigmented latex forms piled up in the corner of a gallery like discarded skin or spilt desire. Benglis was rewriting the rules of what sculpture could be: wet instead of dry, wild instead of restrained.

Her later work, like her metallic pleated bronze series, evokes Baroque elegance fused with queer abstraction. She’s long resisted categorization, in which her work is feminist but also muscular and delicate, yet aggressive.

Now in her 80s, Benglis continues to produce radical, form-driven sculptures that balance softness with strength.

Step into a sculpture by David Altmejd, and you enter a realm where biology meets fantasy. His work is operatic in scale, emotionally unguarded, and wildly ornate. Using materials like mirrors, quartz, fur, resin, and synthetic hair, Altmejd constructs grotesque and divine figures.

His breakout piece The Flux and the Puddle (2014) was a sprawling plexiglass vitrine filled with decaying bodies, crystal towers, multiplying heads, and golden ooze. It was part laboratory, part cathedral, part dreamscape.

His sculptures reference Greek mythology, horror films, and high fashion in equal measure. They evoke transformation, not just physical, but emotional and spiritual. Hair becomes a cosmic thread; crystals erupt like thoughts. The figures are fractured, unfinished, and blooming all at once.

In contrast to the clinical coldness of much contemporary sculpture, Altmejd’s art is messy, mystical, and hyper-sensory. It dares you to feel everything at once: awe, revulsion, desire, grief.

In a time of digital detachment and existential fatigue, these artists offer something rare: vulnerability. Their materials bruise, melt, tear, and weep. They reject the myth that strength comes from hardness and suggest that beauty, power, and emotion are often found in what is soft, unstable, and divine.

Sculpture is no longer just a thing to walk around; it’s something to be in, to feel around the edges of. These artists invite us to lean in closer, to notice the way a fold droops or a thread holds tension. To remember that the sacred and the delicate are often one and the same.

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