PRESENCE: The Figure in British Postwar and Contemporary Sculpture

About

Exhibiting artists: Kenneth Armitage, Jonathan Baldock, Glenys Barton, Jacob van der Beugel, Christie Brown, Ralph Brown, Reg Butler, Lynn Chadwick, Michael Cooper, John Davies, Laurence Edwards, Abigail Fallis, Dame Elisabeth Frink, Antony Gormley, Sean Henry, Nicola Hicks, Michael Hulls, John Humphreys, Alice Kettle, Tim Lewis, Susie MacMurray, Briony Marshall, Bridget McCrum, Henry Moore, Tess Morley, Dame Rachel Whiteread, Yinka Shonibare, William Turnbull, Yan Wang Preston, Emily Young and Carlos Zapata.

The artworks range in style, medium and date, but they all share a preoccupation with the human body as a central theme.

Figurative sculpture has always held a strong presence in British art, from the unnamed carvers of Celtic stone heads and mediaeval master craftsmen whose statuary adorned ecclesiastical spaces across the land, to the Neoclassical splendour of Joseph Flaxman and the gothic aestheticism of Alfred Gilbert. Even in the 20th century, as Modern art changed the way we saw the world, in sculpture, Britain blazed a trail, with pioneering figurative artists such as Jacob Epstein and Eric Gill paving the way for international heavyweights like Barbera Hepworth and Henry Moore. By the late 1940s, Britain’s reputation for avant-garde sculpture was well established and it has continued to grow over the last seven decades. As artistic sensibilities ebb and flow, what has remained constant is a wide-spread interest in the representation of the human figure. It has acted as a control for radical experiments in form and materials and provided an essential touchstone of communication and shared understanding, helping us, as it has done for millennia, to reflect on and understand ourselves and others.