2011 Sculpture in the Close exhibition
Between 27 June – 25 September 2011, °ÄÃÅÁùºÏ²Ê¿ª½±½á¹û showcased works from Barry Flanagan, Anthony Caro, Phillip King, Bruce McLean, Tim Scott, Wendy Taylor, and William Tucker as part of the Sculpture in the Close exhibition.
This outdoor exhibition in the grounds of °ÄÃÅÁùºÏ²Ê¿ª½±½á¹û combined new and existing sculptures and installations. The .
Artists and works
Barry Flanagan exhibited seven works: Composition, Six foot leaping hare on steel pyramid, Large left-handed drummer, Leaping hare on crescent and ball, The Handshakers, Sculler and Large Monument.
Barry Flanagan donated two sculptures to °ÄÃÅÁùºÏ²Ê¿ª½±½á¹û: The Cricketer in 1989 and San Marco Horse in 2009, shortly before his death. San Marco Horse arrived first in 1988 for the inaugural Sculpture in the Close event and has since become an iconic fixture in First Court, beloved by generations of students.
Jo Melvin highlights how Barry Flanagan's work links physical agility with imaginative leaps, reflected in his fascination with the mad March hare as a symbol of inventive spontaneity. Flanagan’s embrace of unconventional, seemingly irrelevant paths has made the hare a fitting emblem of creativity in modern sculpture.
Anthony Caro exhibited Vespers. The sculpture exemplifies Caro's 1970s period by placing sculpture directly on the ground, merging it with the viewer's space, a practice he pioneered. The title, alluding to evening and the evening star, evokes temporal cycles, with the sculpture's tilt and structure suggesting both mechanical and organic forms, aligning it with natural rhythms while emphasizing its integration into everyday space.
Phillip King exhibited Obelisk with Flame from a recent group of works filled with cultural resonance and often signalling profound art historical roots. It juxtaposes the stability of the monolithic obelisk with the instability of the flame, reflecting a dynamic tension between nature and history, and embodying the contradictions of modernist utopianism and anachronistic symbolism.
The installation and display of a sculpture (Untitled new work) by Bruce McLean is a rare event; his approach to exhibiting his work has been characteristically unpredictable, systematically unorthodox and deliberately contrary.
McLean has done more than perhaps any other British artist since the 1960s to keep sculpture both conceptually and literally mobile. At a time when sculptors like Caro were eliminating the plinth, McLean brought it back in the work Pose Works for Plinths to highlight its absurd theatricality. More recently, the New Live Talking Sculpture event at the Bernard Jacobson Gallery in 2009 utilised the artist’s own body to both facilitate and frustrate the verbal commentary.
Tim Scott exhibited two works: Song for Adele, and one of British abstract sculpture’s great masterpieces Cathedral.
Cathedral is the type of work for which Sculpture in the Close might have been invented, exemplifying the creativity required when an artist designs a sculpture specifically for outdoor display. It is designed to integrate with nature rather than compete with it, creating a space akin to the negative architecture of Gothic cathedrals.
Song for Adele is part of a series by Scott inspired by Rodin's "Torso of Adele," reflecting the tension between discipline and freedom through twisted steel forms that appear spontaneous yet are meticulously crafted.
Bronze Shell, exhibited by Wendy Taylor embodies a deep interest in how geometric forms evolve from organic origins. Its large scale highlights the absence of what created it, emphasizing human creativity as a process of constant transformation and departure from its origins. In this way, it is a correlate to her works deploying mechanical and manufactured objects. These works are often also subtly inferring the origins of their designs and of the processes that produce them in the forms and patterns of nature.
William Tucker exhibited two works: Messenger and Cave. The most striking feature that the recent works have in common is an overwhelming fluidity, and a surprising lack of ductility. Their robustly unfinished appearance is part of an overall intractability making them seem as if they emerged from a different dimension rather than being shaped by conventional methods.
The title of Messenger seems thoroughly ironic, given the work’s apparent insistence on a failure of communication. Even after the viewer is able to grasp the object’s resemblance to a foot, this recognition is quickly succeeded by another; that this is a foot in motion, on the point of departure, leaving one condition for another.
The title Cave playfully alludes to Plato's shadows which, like Tucker's works, only dimly evoke the original forms. There is a paradox inherent in Tucker’s negotiation with these figures that turns the moment of our recognition into an event that opens up its meanings.
Thanks and acknowledgements
We gratefully acknowledge the generosity of the sculptors in lending their work for this exhibition.
The 2011 exhibition was curated by Dr Rod Mengham in collaboration with advisors Tim Marlow and Richard Humphreys. Several galleries and organisations have given invaluable advice and assistance. We are especially grateful to Waddingtons, the British Council, Pangolin London, and the Poussin Gallery.
