Over the past decade there has been a renewed interest in the practice of casting. Casts of all kinds proliferate in our daily lives, and artists avail themselves of newly available digital techniques and artificial materials. Casts embody the special but unseen quality of almost all sculpture : that it is more often serial than unique. Sculpture is inherently plural and casting makes it so.

The artists in this show have been chosen because they are fascinated by casting, and what it allows them to do. For some it is a way of capturing transient life stages ; for others a way of immortalising historical events. While some use plaster for its historical associations, others use 3D scans to speak of cloning, surrogacy, and virtual multiplication. It also gives form to what might not otherwise be known. Artists explore the moulds as much as the images, looking quite literally inside the sculpture itself. Contemporary works have been placed alongside historic cast collections to highlight continuities experienced by generations of students who have grown up alongside these collections.

Infinite Sculpture is the result of a collaboration between the Beaux-Arts de Paris and the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum. It draws on the historic collections of Beaux-Arts de Paris, Belas-Artes de Lisboa, the Louvre and the Réunion des musées nationaux.