The Shape of Things to Come

Published in conjunction with the opening of the new Saatchi Gallery in London, one of today’s most important institutions collecting and exhibiting contemporary art, this mammoth book is the most comprehensive volume on contemporary sculpture. The title itself refers to H. G. Wells’s eponymous novel which envisioned the future and was a surprisingly accurate prophecy reflecting the author’s own time. That book inspired Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey, in which a great monolith is an iconic but enigmatic sculptural presence. This new book opens with an enormous, standing monolithic Styrofoam sculpture of a videocassette of 2001 and, like the Wells book, seeks to explore how sculpture will evolve in the coming decades.

Meghan Dailey is an art historian and critic whose work appears in Artforum, Time Out New York, Frieze, and Art Press.