Lynn Chadwick

About

Though it began late, we are looking back on a career of over fifty years. Lynn Chadwick considers he became a sculptor in 1948, when he was thirty-five. He had been working as architect's draughtsman and expecting to qualify as an architect. It was the architect Rodney Thomas - himself the author of sculptures with movable parts - who had encouraged him to make mobiles, usually as part of exhibition designs. The published catalogue of his work begins with more than fifty mobiles and stabiles in a variety of forms and materials, culminating in two commissions for the 1951 Festival of Britain's South Bank Exhibition: a stabile to stand outside the Regatta Restaurant and a mobile to hang in the Riverside Restaurant. The stabile, Cypress, was a tall and lissom construction of brass rods and copper sheet. The mobile was inside the other restaurant, an iron and steel arrangement of floating leaf shapes and disks. Four more mobiles were commissioned, bought or publicly displayed that year, including the triumphant standing mobile The Fisheater in iron and copper, made for the Arts Council of Great Britain and shown at the RBA Galleries and then at the Tate.
By Norbert Lynton