Jo Baring for Totem: The Untold Story of Sculpture

'This lively and passionate book celebrates all the ways that sculpture roots us into first-hand physical experience - both of the world and our innermost feelings' SIR ANTONY GORMLEY

Jo Baring is an art historian and curator. She is host of the popular podcast Sculpting Lives and in 2023 was elected as the Frankland Visitor to Brasenose College, Oxford. She is the Director of the Ingram Collection of Modern British and Contemporary Art and a former Director of Christie's UK.

Jo joins us for Totem: The Untold Story of Sculpture.

For forty thousand years, we have been carving and moulding, shaping and chiselling, feeling our way and sensing our place in the world through sculpture.

In this accessible, story-led journey into the heart of sculpture, renowned art historian and curator Jo Baring explores creativity, memory and why we have been driven to make art in this medium since the very beginning of humanity.

She examines sculptures from the pre-historic Lion Man figure found in a German cave to an ancient Mayan pyramid that conjures a serpent made of shadows and icons of the Italian Renaissance such as Michelangelo's devastating Pieta. Along the way we encounter in a fresh light the work of twentieth century and contemporary giants such as Alberto Giacometti, Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore, Constantin Brancusi, Louise Bourgeois, Yayoi Kusama and Antony Gormley, among others.

Lyrical and beautifully illustrated, Totem is a celebration of art, those creating it and those it means something to.