Sculpture is the broad category: any three-dimensional artwork made by carving, modelling, casting or assembling material, from an abstract steel piece to a bronze figure. A statue is a specific kind of sculpture, usually representing a person or animal. So Michelangelo's David is both a sculpture and, more precisely, a statue.
The core difference
Sculpture is the general art form, while a statue is a sculpture that specifically depicts a person or animal.
- sculpture — a three-dimensional work of art made by carving, modelling, casting, or assembling material: The museum's courtyard displays a huge steel sculpture.
- statue — a three-dimensional sculpture, usually of a person or animal, made from stone, metal, or another solid material: The park has a bronze statue honoring the city's founder.
How to tell them apart
The simplest way to remember it: statue is a subset of sculpture. If a work shows a recognisable figure, a person or an animal, you can safely call it a statue. If it is abstract, or made from assembled or cast material without depicting a figure, it is sculpture but not a statue.
The confusion usually runs one way, calling any sculpture a statue, which trips people up with modern or abstract pieces that have no figure at all. Sculpture can also refer to the art form as a whole, as in a gallery floor devoted to modern sculpture, a collective sense that statue does not share.
