Steve Linn was born in Chicago in 1943 and has pursued an international career as a sculptor for more than five decades.
His early sculptural practice centred principally on wood and bronze. A significant change came in 1982 when, while creating a work about the American photographer Imogen Cunningham, Linn incorporated a life-sized photographic image sandblasted onto glass. The possibilities of the material fascinated him, and glass subsequently became an integral part of his artistic vocabulary.
Rather than abandoning the materials with which he had previously worked, Linn began combining them. Glass, bronze, aluminium, steel, wood and other materials became components within increasingly complex constructions, allowing him to develop the distinctive form of narrative portraiture for which he is now known.
In 1975, Linn was awarded the prestigious Rome Prize in Sculpture, enabling him to work at the American Academy in Rome. His career has subsequently included numerous exhibitions in the United States and Europe, and his sculptures are represented in public and museum collections internationally.
Since 1993, Linn has lived and worked in the south of France, where he continues to maintain his studio. He became a French citizen in 2008.
His subjects have ranged across art, literature, music, architecture, science and political history. Rather than conventional portraits, Linn creates what he describes as “documentary sculpture”, researching his subjects extensively and constructing visual narratives from the objects, imagery, materials and symbols associated with their lives and work.
In 2026, the Musée du Verre François Décorchemont in Conches-en-Ouche, France, presented Steve Linn: Embodied Memories, bringing together a selection of his large-scale sculptural portraits and demonstrating the continuing evolution of a practice in which technical virtuosity and storytelling are inseparable.