5 Sculptures That Made Our Heart list This Week

At Arts to Hearts Project, we see a lot of art. Every week, every medium, every possible way of making something and putting it into the world. Paintings, drawings, photographs, ceramics, textiles it all finds its way to us, and we love every bit of it.

But this week we are dedicating our heart list entirely to sculpture. Because sculpture done well is one of the most extraordinary things in contemporary art right now and the artists we kept coming back to this week were all working in three dimensions in ways that we simply could not look away from.

There is something about a sculpture that gets you differently from anything flat. It is not just something you look at it is something you are in the presence of. It breathes. It occupies the same space you do. It has weight and shadow and a physical reality that a canvas never quite has.

You walk around it and it changes. The light on it shifts. What you see from one angle disappears from another. And the best sculptors know exactly how to use that how to make something that rewards every angle and holds something true from every direction.

This is our heart list for this week.

1. Reflexiones Silenciosas by Inés Lara @ineslara_sculpture

First on our heart list this week is this quietly extraordinary ceramic sculpture by Inés Lara, called Reflexiones Silenciosas Silent Reflections. It is the bust of a woman with her eyes closed, completely calm, a scattering of flowers set into her hair. She is glazed in deep blue-black and streaks of metallic gold, with a weathered, almost molten finish that makes the clay look ancient and alive at the same time. And then you notice the quietest part of all: three smaller faces, eyes closed too, surfacing gently from her chest like thoughts, or memories, or the selves she carries around inside her.

It is high-temperature fired ceramic, and not a large piece but it holds an enormous amount of stillness. Inés Lara is a sculptor from Tlaxiaco, Oaxaca, now based in Oaxaca de Juárez, who trained at the Centro de Arte Saúl Serrano and the Centro de las Artes de San Agustín. She works clay into these figures of women, nature and quiet mythology pieces about the space between the body and everything it holds and has shown her work across Mexico and beyond.

Find her work and give her a follow, there is a real depth to everything she makes.

02. An anatomy in formation by Neta Bachrach @netabachrach

An anatomy in formation by Neta Bachrach earns its place on our heartlist this week, a piece that feels less made than grown. It hangs on the wall like a creature caught halfway through becoming itself: a rounded hood folds over at the top, and beneath it a tangle of limbs spills downward in browns, rust and cream, each one twisting a little differently from the last.

The surface is felted and fibrous, warm enough that you almost want to reach out and touch it less like an object and more like an organism. There’s a sea-creature logic to it, but the title keeps you honest: this is a body still forming, an anatomy that hasn’t quite finished deciding what it is.

Neta is a Tel Aviv–based mixed media artist working in contemporary sculpture, and that instinct for shapes sitting right between the familiar and the invented runs through everything on her page.

Follow along, her feed is full of forms you won’t have seen anywhere else.

03. The fold by Regardt van der Meulen @regardtvandermeulen

Third on our heart list this week is The fold by Regardt van der Meulen and it’s one you feel before you understand. It’s a tall figure wrapped in a hood, cloaked from head to toe, the face hidden in shadow. But look closer and the whole thing is full of holes and gaps, like it’s slowly falling apart while it just stands there.

That’s the strange bit: it’s made of steel, but it feels soft, almost breakable. Even the way it stands adds to it the weight shifted onto one leg, the other easing forward, so the whole figure feels caught mid-step rather than frozen in place.

Regardt is a sculptor based in Johannesburg, and he trained at the University of Cape Town. For years he’s been making these broken, unravelling human figures about memory, time and how fragile a body really is and this one sit right at the heart of that.

Follow him and scroll a while every piece carries this same quiet weight.

4. CHARLY by Paula Pons @paula_pons

Our fourth pick this week is CHARLY by Paula Pons and you have to look twice before it hits you that the whole thing is made of newspaper. It’s a life-size seated figure, one leg crossed over the other, a cigarette held up in one hand, glasses and moustache and that unmistakable hair a portrait of Charly García, the legendary Argentine rock musician.

What gets you is the material: it’s all newspaper and packing tape, the trousers built from bright magazine pages, the shirt and face from soft grey newsprint. Out of crumpled paper she’s somehow caught a real pose and a real presence he looks like he’s mid-sentence, about to say something back to you.

Paula is a Buenos Aires artist who came to sculpture from painting, and started working with newspaper almost by accident in 2012 — she’s been building these big paper figures ever since, and shows regularly around the city.

Follow her and watch what she pulls out of a stack of old paper is its own reward.

5. Autism by Bartek Śnieciński @bartek_sniecinski

Last on our heart list this week and honestly our favourite of the whole list is Autism by Bartek Śnieciński. It’s one of the smallest pieces here, but easily one of the quietest and heaviest: a little bronze form standing on thin, delicate legs, its body opening outward in the middle like a shell or a small dress.

The head at the top is rough and broken open, as if you’re being quietly let in on whatever is happening inside it. There’s a real tenderness to how closed-off and self-contained the whole thing feel, a full inner world folded into 31 centimetres of bronze.

Bartek is a Polish artist from the woods just outside Warsaw, who came to sculpture after years of working as a photographer. His work tends to take something ordinary and turn it into something strange and deeply felt, and this piece is a good example of exactly that.

Take a look through the rest there’s a lot going on beneath the surface with him.

Five sculptures this week that proved something we already knew but needed to be reminded of that art made with your hands, shaped from real material, existing in real space, hits differently than anything else. Go show these artists some love. Follow them, share their work, leave a comment that actually says something.

And if you work in mixed media The Big Book of Mixed Media Artists 2026 by Arts to Hearts Project is open for submissions right now.

This is a hardcover publication bringing together 100 artists whose practices move across materials, techniques and disciplines collage, assemblage, painting, textiles, found objects, photography, printmaking and beyond. No prescribed subject, no single visual language.

Just your work, exactly as it is. 100 selected artists each receive a dedicated two-page spread, a certificate, and promotion through Arts to Hearts Project. There is also a $500 cash award and a glass trophy for the winner. Submissions close September 21st, 2026.