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Reg Butler, Study for Third Watcher, 1954
Exhibition
'Towards a New World: Sculpture in Post-War Britain'
16 Mar 2023 – 22 Apr 2023
Regular hours
- Thursday
- 10:00 – 17:30
- Friday
- 10:00 – 17:30
- Saturday
- 10:00 – 16:00
by appointment - Monday
- 10:00 – 17:30
- Tuesday
- 10:00 – 17:30
- Wednesday
- 10:00 – 17:30
Free admission
Address
- 6 Albemarle Street
- London
- W1S 4BY
- United Kingdom
Travel Information
- Green Park
Marlborough Fine Art London is delighted to present Towards a New World: Sculpture in Post-War Britain. The exhibition will showcase works by the ‘geometry of fear’ group of post-war sculptors who were influenced by trail-blazing artists such as Germaine Richier and Alberto Giacometti.
About
In 1952, art critic Herbert Read curated the British Pavillion at the Venice Biennale. Entitled New Aspects of British Sculpture, the exhibition introduced a group of young British sculptors to an international audience. Those on show included Kenneth Armitage (1916-2002), Reg Butler (1913-1981), Lynn Chadwick (1914-2003), Geoffrey Clarke (1924-2014), Bernard Meadows (1915-2005), Eduardo Paolozzi (1924-2005) and William Turnbull (1922-2012). Read coined the term ‘geometry of fear’ to describe their new angular and metallic style of sculpture:
These new images belong to the iconography of despair, or of defiance; and the more innocent the artist, the more effectively he transmits the collective guilt. Here are images of flight, or ragged claws ‘scuttling across the floors of silent seas’, of excoriated flesh, frustrated sex, the geometry of fear.
Splintering and adrift, human and inhuman, these ambiguous forms were emblematic of a period that precariously straddled the horror of the past and promise of the future.
