The Pliable Plane: The Wall as Surface in Sculpture and Architecture, 1945–75

In The Pliable Plane, curator and historian Penelope Curtis traces the ways sculp­ture infiltrated architectural thought over the post-war period. Her study identifies the wall as a particular locus of creative thinking – a surface which produces both continuity and separation, and which similarly unites and distinguishes the two disciplines. Surveying a series of walls – carved, cast, applied, imagined, and even conceptual – in such places as bomb shelters, caves, war memorials, and public buildings, Curtis introduces a cast of renowned and lesser-known practitioners who defined the three-dimensional conception of the years 1945 to 1975.