London.- The 20/21 British Art Fair, the fair which champions Modern British art, will take place from 14 – 18 September at the Royal College of Art, Kensington Gore, London. It will be opened by the highly acclaimed author and scriptwriter, Anthony Horowitz, at 5pm on the 14th. The Royal College of Art, arguably ‘the spiritual home of British art’, is an ideal setting to see work by the great names of the 20th century, many of whom are former students: Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Elisabeth Frink, Luke Frost, Barbara Hepworth, David Hockney, Peter Lanyon, L. S. Lowry, Henry Moore, Paul Nash, Briget Riley, Stanley Spencer and Graham Sutherland. Alongside will be a large selection of contemporary work by established names such as Hirst, Tracey Emin, Banksy as well as by both emerging artists and recent graduates. With some 56 of the country’s leading dealers exhibiting, the Fair, now in its 24th year, is not to be missed!
A curated selection of sculpture which highlights British excellence and expands on the theme set earlier this year by the Royal Academy. Exhibitors have been invited to submit pieces of special interest and, with many of the best Modern British dealers exhibiting at the Fair, this promises to be an exciting and informative feature. With names as wide-ranging and significant as Jacob Epstein and Henry Moore, Hepworth and Anthony Caro and Anish Kapoor, Antony Gormley and Damien Hirst all now celebrated internationally as well as nationally, there is a strong case to be made for British sculpture, rather than painting, representing this country’s most original and successful means of artistic expression through the 20th century. Yet, as the recent Modern British Sculpture show at the Royal Academy made clear, as much by its omissions as by its inclusions, the story is even richer and more interesting than such a random list of names as this might at first suggest. With this in mind, the organisers of this year’s 20/21 British Art Fair (being held at the Royal College of Art from 14 – 18 September) decided to put together a selected ‘trail’ of their own. Curated by exhibitors René Gimpel and Peter Osborne and entitled ‘Form – Matter – Material’, 12 galleries are participating in the ‘trail’ which, it is hoped, will draw wider attention to just some of those other sculptors, and periods of sculpture, which many felt were perhaps sidelined or neglected in that show.
With this in mind the emphasis of the 22 pieces is very much on post-war and more recent work, the only earlier pieces being Jacob Epstein’s vividly modelled Portrait of Sunita 1925 (Boundary Gallery) and Henry Moore’s one-time teacher, Leon Underwood’s exuberant, African-influenced terracotta figure June of Youth 1933 pictured right (Redfern Gallery). After this, the focus moves on to that quite remarkable, youthful explosion of sculptural activity in the immediate post-war period, the critic Herbert Read’s ‘geometry of fear’ sculptors, Reg Butler, Kenneth Armitage and Lynn Chadwick among others, who made such an impact at the 1952 Venice Biennale. In fact all eight of those who showed then are represented here and many by extremely characteristic pieces. Geoffrey Clarke, for example, whose ‘Complexities of Man’ piece at the Biennale caused a particular stir, is represented here by another work from 1951, full of those post-war political and social anxieties about nuclear war that characterised all their work, the welded iron sculpture Man as Fortress (Keith Chapman). No less seminal a piece is Kenneth Armitage’s major bronze Linked Figures 1949, pictured right (Piano Nobile), the first sculpture in which he experiments with the idea, later to become very characteristic of his work, of grouping two or more figures in a single, dynamic form. Meanwhile, equally resonant of this significant moment in post-war British sculpture are Eduardo Paolozzi’s magnificent bull of 1946, Bernard Meadows’ Armed man I 1961, with its animalistic body armour and claws and Reg Butler’s precariously balanced bronze, Girl Bending Over, 1955, of which he observed at the time “I try to get the mass up in the air like an explosion…”.
Of the others in this original Biennale group, Lynn Chadwick is seen here with a later piece, one of his monumental bronzes from the great ‘Jubilee’ series that emerged in the late 70s, the two figures, their cloaks blowing out behind them, of his Maquette Jubilee II 1983, imbued with an intense, dynamic energy; William Turnbull, too, is represented by a later 1980s piece, Metaphoric Venus 4 (1982), one of what were termed his ‘new’ sculptures, sleek, ambiguous forms created between 1979-1986, that embody ideas derived from primitive fertility symbols, non-European masks and prehistoric tools; and finally, there is Robert Adams, whose exuberant carved yew-wood figure Centaur 1948, dating to that period before he went more fully abstract, again speaks of a fascination with the direct expressiveness of primitive art.
Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth had of course also been shown in that Venice Biennale display as kind of godparents to this younger generation and they are present here too but, again, with rather later pieces: Moore with a highly characteristic 1976 cast bronze, Working Model for Reclining Figure: Prop, Hepworth with a rather more abstract small bronze Six Forms in a Circle of 1967 (both Osborne Samuel). Moore, meanwhile had become, a point of reaction for sculptors emerging in the late 50s, among the most notable of whom was, of course, his former assistant Anthony Caro, represented here by one of his ruggedly architectural welded bronze/brass pieces Late Quarter (Variation F) 1981. The even more iconoclastic 60s spirit is, at same time, also wittily represented here by two highly distinctive and unusual Pop Art works, Jann Haworth’s mixed media Lindner Doll 1964 and Clive Barker’s chrome-plated bronze, Homage to Magritte 1968, Peter Blake’s wife at the time, Haworth’s sewn and stuffed soft sculpture, using vinyl, nylon stockings and sequins (among other things), broke every rule in the sculpture book while the shiny blank modernity of Barker’s sculpture now appears almost like an early prefiguring of Jeff Koons. Barry Flanagan, too, worked in a similarly anarchic vein for much of his life, as his edgily humorous Anvil and Pilgrim 1984 powerfully demonstrates. That same, distinctly 60s, spirit also lived on in the Boyle Family’s work, a piece like Study for the Fire Series with Blackened Sandstone 1989, clearly deriving its inspiration from the ‘found’ forms of the street, becoming both poetic and intensely resonant in feeling. (Barry Flanagan is having a retrospective at Tate Britain opening 27th September). A good note, in short, to end on – the innovative, thoughtful, engaged and poetic qualities that have always abounded in the rich tradition of British sculpture over the last century or more, still very much alive and in good hands! Visit the fair’s website at … http://www.britishartfair.co.uk
