Krystopher Sapp takes antique gun parts and reassembles them into fanciful sculptures. This is “The Privateer,” and it looks the part. It’s made from the remains of a Savage, a M1 Garand, an ’03 Springfield, an AR-16 and a M-16. His exhibit, “When a Good Man Goes to War,” is on display at La Luz de Jesus Gallery in Los Angeles until January 29.

Link -via My Modern Met

This great book sculpture and many more like it were completed by a completely anonymous artist who covertly installed them inside a variety of museums, libraries and other locations in Edinburgh, Scotland. While no one knows who is responsible, the artist did reveal herself as a woman in her farewell note. Check out the rest at the link.

Link Via Laughing Squid

Although it looks convincingly like a pair of melting picture frames, it is actually a wooden sculpture. This is one of three in a series by artists Rémy Clémente and Morgan Maccari dribbling on a gallery floor.

Link -via Technabob | Artists’ Website

This lovely sculpture by artist Tomoo Yamaji changes from a dragon to a ring of flowers without removing any parts. He presents it as a spiritual companion:

When we are threatened by evil, “it” will appear before us in the form of the dragon and prevent the evil with its fierce face and roar then bring peace to us. After that, “it” will transform into the form of the flower to continue quietly watching our peaceful life. However, we must remember that “it” will not always be on our side. Once we will be evil and bring the disaster, “it” will transform from flower into dragon and mercilessly attack us with its overwhelming power to prevent us.

Link (Google Translate) -via Super Punch | Photo: Henge

The late Belgian artist Tom Frantzen erected this playful outdoor sculpture in Brussels. De Vaartkapoen shows a man emerging from a manhole to trip a police officer passing by. The cop wears the badge number 15, just like Officer 15 from Hergé’s Tintin comics.

Link -via Colossal

Michael Beitz is quite skilled at turning ordinary objects into otherworldly art pieces. While my personal favorite is this great jointed tree, there are plenty more amazing objects at the link.

Link Via Laughing Squid

Skip ahead about a minute into the video to see this amazing work in action. David Cerny, an artist from the Czech Republic, made this 14-ton sculpture for a business park in Charlotte, North Carolina. Its segments spin, align, and spit out streams of water.

Link -via The Presurfer | Artist’s Website (warning: auto-sound)

Yes, the stones have been laughing at you. No one else believes you, but I do. Look, that one is doing it right now!

Link -via Spoon & Tamago | Sculpture and photo by Hirotoshi Ito

It looks like a pretty but not extraordinary illustration, right? Keep scrolling.

It’s actually a series of sheets of bullet-proof glass suspended so that they look like a face when viewed from the right angle. Michael Murphy assembled this sculpture. This and other works by him are on display at gallery nine5 in New York City.

Link -via Colossal

You can find this amusing sculpture by Miquel Barceló in Union Square in New York City. It stands 26 feet tall and weighs 7 tons. Why an elephant, let alone one in this position? The artist explained, “A tree looks like an upside-down elephant, and when you touch a tree, it feels like the skin of an elephant.”

Link -via My Modern Met | Photo: Marlborough Gallery

Previously by Miquel Barceló: The UN’s New Grotto

In gratitude for the attention that redditors had given to his work, the artist Zac Max let them decide what should be the subject of his next sculpture. Appropriately, they chose a bear with chainsaws for arms.

There’s a lot of money being spent on research for prosthetic arms. Perhaps an easier solution would be to give people chainsaw arms. Oh, on some occasions chainsaw arms would not be practical. But at other times, they would be essential.

Link -via reddit

Beautiful paper sculptures are being left around Scotland’s libraries as a token of appreciation. The artist’s M.O.? Puns, Twitter shout outs, and complete anonymity.

Link -via Boing Boing | Photo Credit chrisdonia

Etsy seller Creaturesfromel creates one of a kind animals from wire, clay and paint. The results are stunning and certainly worth a look.

Link Via BuzzFeed

I don’t know about you guys, but I am fascinated by sand sculptures. It’s just amazing that people put so much time and effort into creating something beautiful but extremely temporary. That’s why these photos from the World Championship of Sand Sculpting are so great -it’s a way to actually make these works of art last forever.

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This is a bronze sculpture by Sukhi Barber. That is possible to make such an object self-supporting is mind-blowing.

One of Barber’s major themes is “the transcendence of our limiting view of a solid reality.” So, appropriately, this sculpture is entitled “Appearance/Emptiness.”

Artist’s Website -via Colossal

Using hundreds of tiny wooden blocks artist Shawn Smith is creating “8-bit” sculptures. At a time when retro 8-bit anything is extremely popular these sculptures take this motif and apply it to every day objects and animals. See the full gallery at the link.

Link

A Korean artist named Chan Girl Park creates sculptures out of steel cross-sections of his subject matter. Each assembly is held together with perpendicular rods. He also welds steel nuts together to form smooth surfaces for figure studies. You can view a Korean-language description of his work at the link, or a gallery of some of his finer works at Colossal. Link (Google Translate) -via Colossal | Photo: Monthly Art World

We’ve all seen the occasional origami made from dollar bills, but those have nothing on these 32 amazing artworks made from currencies around the world. Personally, I like the carved sculptures like the one in the top center of the photo montage above.

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Canadian artist Maskull Lasserre carves human skeletal features into ordinary wooden implements. He can make an axe handle look like a human spine or give teeth to a picture frame. This rather haunting human skull is carved directly into a display cabinet. Link -via Colossal

Jaume Plensa, an artist from Spain, has a motif of monumental, rounded heads. He uses a wide variety of materials, from polyester resin to stainless steel. Pictured above is one of a pair resting in the countryside, looking at each other. You can see other images of them at Fubiz. They’re oddly soothing to look. Artist’s Website -via Fubiz (Google Translate)

I know you Neatonauts love to argue about what is or isn’t art, so these cool art installations are a great subject for debate. From a bloody phone booth by Banksy to Mark Jenkins’ surreal sculptures, there’s sure to be something for everyone in this WebUrbanist article.

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Japanese artist Motohiko Odani makes gloriously fluid sculptures. I can’t quite figure out what material he uses.

This unicorn sculpture lies at the center of an exhibit of his work called “Phantom Limb” at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo. This Is Colossal has other photos from the show.

Link via Dude Craft | Artist’s Website | Photo: Mori Art Museum

Ben Butler sculpts and assembles deliciously shaped wooden sculptures, such as the above cedar piece entitled “Furrow”. He has an exhibit that opens tomorrow at the Zg Gallery in Chicago.

Link via Dude Craft | Gallery Website

Estonian sculptor Mati Karmin makes furniture from old naval mines found off the coast of his homeland:

Northern coast of Estonia and especially the islands, wich during the years of occupation were an almost inaccessible border zone for the common including heaps of corroded mine shells, wich are basically spheres with holes, spireks and shackles.[...]

Karmin uses mines as modules. The entire furinture series is composed of only two existing basic forms of mines – the hemisphere and the cylinder. With great delight, he has concocted utility articles of diverse forms, resulting in armchairs, writing desk, bed, toilet, cupoard, bathtub, swing, fireplace…By the hand of the artist the militaristic metallic scrap has become the design furinture of remarkably modern appearance.

Link via Nerdcore | Photo: Marine Mine

Etsy seller ArtAkimbo created a sculpture that looks like a tentacle entering the room through a porthole. It’s made from wood, styrofoam, newsprint, and sawdust. At the link, you can see pictures of what it would look like in a well-furnished office or bedroom.

Link via technabob | Artist’s Blog

“Boxel” is a sculpture created by architecture students at the University of Applied Sciences in Detmold, Germany. It’s built out of more than 2,000 empty beer boxes:

the temporary construction was designed using parametric software to control the position of the boxes in relation to the overall geometry and to analyze the structural performance. in order to define the construction concept and the detailing of the connection several static load tests were made to understand the structural behaviour of the unusual building material, especially since the empty beer boxes were not stacked onto but freely organized next to each other. in parallel to a series of shearing and bending tests in the university’s laboratory of material research the structural concept was simulated and optimized using fem-software.

Link via DudeCraft | Photo: Dirk Schelpmeier and Marcus Brehm

Bill McHugh creates kinetic sculptures that are driven by natural forces like wind, sun, water, squirrels or even birds!

Keeping the sculptures running literally costs peanuts — or birdseed, as the case may be. The Swirl-a-Squirrel runs on 30 peanuts a day, McHugh estimates. All combined, he figures he goes through 2,000 peanuts per week, or a 50-pound bag every three weeks.

But as he has refined them, he has also incorporated other elements. The bird-oriented one he calls “The Hitchcock” works this way: as many as 32 birds can land on the tiny metal cups that are spaced around a wheel. If they do, that sets a second wheel in motion; on it, other cups dip into a reservoir of water at the bottom and are carried up until they empty into a basin at the top. Then the water trickles down into the bottom reservoir and the process begins again.

Link – Via Notcot

Being raised in sunny San Diego, I never even got to build a snowman before.  That’s why I find snow sculptures to be purely impossible and amazing. Even if you’ve grown up in the harshest winters around though, you’re still certain to be impressed with these detailed snow sculptures on Web Urbanist.

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Australian artist James Corbett began sculpting old car parts in 1999 while managing a car recycling business in Brisbane. Eighteen months later, he closed the shop and turned pro. Corbett never bends the parts, but uses the existing shapes to create (comparatively) realistic forms. Gallery at the link.

Link via DudeCraft | Artist’s Website | Image: James Corbett

These cool sculptures are made during an annual event called Canstruction. Teams of engineers, architects and students get together to make their inspired creations using canned food. After the public exposition of the artworks, the food is donated to local food banks and shelters.

Link Image Via Canstruction

Recycle, reuse, rethink how we look at garbage.  Tires are an especially volatile item, as they take up space and emit terrible fumes when burned.  Check out Oddee‘s collection of creative sculptures made from discarded tires.

Link  | Above example found at mo_metalart’s Flickr set.

Previously on Neatorama – Tired.

Update 10/15/09 by Alex: The artist is Mirko Siakkou-Flodin, and this particular tire sculpture is at the Jumeirah Beach Residence in Dubai, UAE. Oddee is a great source of many interesting things, and they usually credit their photos, so I wonder why they didn’t do it in this instance.

These terribly awesome monsters are products of the mind of New York artist Jason Hackenwerth. He makes both wearable balloon suits and balloon sculptures. Each creature takes about 8 hours to make, totally worth it in my opinion.

Link Via Craftzine

Talk about computer viruses! Sculptor Forrest McCluer took salvaged 30 old PCs from the landfill and turned them into sculptures of viruses (the biological kind). This one above is inspired by the T4 Bacteriophage:

The “T9 Track Virus” is another version of the T4 Bacteriophage. It consists of PC power supply cables, CD-ROMs, sections of 9-track magnetic tapes, and parts of floppy drives. When the piece is on display, McCluer scatters a pile of unraveled 9-track tapes under it to represent the bacteria cells destroyed by the T9 Bacteriophage Virus.

Link | More at Forrest McCluer’s Website

Also at the Neatorama Shop: T4 Bacteriophage Plush Toy by Giant Microbes

Oddee has a collection of some truly amazing ice sculptures, the most impressive of which is this massive ice castle in China. The other sculptures are also fascinating though. It always amazes me how much artistry is required to make one of these pieces when it will only melt away eventually anyway.

Link

Women’s Day has a fantastic collection of sand sculptures all of which have interesting faces carved into them. I think sand sculpting is so amazing, it’s so much work for something that will be destroyed so quickly after its creation. While the one above is my favorite, I think they are all work a second, even third, look.

Link

In the lush Australian old-growth forest of Eukalyptus of Mount Dandenongs, Victoria, are a set of mesmerizing sculptures by a self-taught artist named William Ricketts.

Environmental Graffiti blog has the story:

Hidden deep within a lush Australian rainforest are a set of mystical Aborigine sculptures seemingly merged into the natural surroundings. Moss covered torsos of men, women and children protrude from tree trunks and boulders. Some reach heavenward with widespread wings, others envelop each other protectively – all are symbols of the relationship the indigenous Australian Aborigines have with nature.

Link

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by oezicomix.

For the past ten years, artist Marizio Savini has been making sculptures from thousands of pieces of chewed bubble gum, and sells his creations for as much as £40,000 each.

His sculptures include a life-size buffalo, a grizzly bear and businessmen doing gymnastics.

Why chewing gum?

"…because it seemed to me an amazingly versatile material compared to those used by the traditional arts such as painting…

"I believe that in my work … this material is redeemed and acquires a capacity and it has an expressive dignity of its own. I work the chewing gum when it is warm and manipulate it with a knife just like some traditional material like clay.

The most important step is the fixing of the sculptures with formaldehyde and antibiotic."

Link – via blogs

Food art is a strange field, but I can’t help but love people who not only decided to play with their food, but make a living out of it. Over at WebUrbanist, they have spotlighted a few great food artists, one specializes in bento, one in food carvings, one in landscapes of food and then there’s the sculpture/photographer above. They may make you love art their art work, or they might make you hungry, either way, it’s certainly not a bad thing.

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Chris Gilmour, a U.K. artist represented by the Perugi Artecontemporanea Gallery in Padua, Italy, creates amazing sculptures using cardboard.

Link – via haha.nu