SCULPTORS
oƒ NOTE &
PROSPECT
Modern British Sculpture
SCULPTORS
oƒ NOTE &
PROSPECT
Modern British Sculpture
TEXTS :
Peter Davies
Autumn 2013 Paisnel Gallery 9 Bury Street, St James’s, London SW1Y 6 A B T E L E PHON E : 020 7930 9293 E M A I L : info @ paisnelgallery.co.uk W E B SI T E : www.paisnelgallery.co.uk
All sculptures are available for sale on receipt of this catalogue Please contact gallery for availability Gallery hours: Monday to Friday 10am – 6pm Saturdays and other times by appointment.
Previous page: Cat no. 20: Boat, Peter King
Foreword Covering sixty years from 1953 to 2013 this exhibition features works by many prominent British sculptors, such as Robert Adams, Denis Mitchell and Brian Wall, whose creativity and importance have already been recognised by their inclusion in numerous public collections and the publication of monographs or catalogues raisonnĂŠs. It is also an opportunity to re-establish awareness of some highly talented artists who, in their heyday, were frequently exhibiting with some of the greatest sculptors of the time, notably Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth and Elizabeth Frink. Robert de Quin, for instance, was a prominent member of the Free Painters and Sculptors group and held several solo exhibitions with the illustrious Roland, Browse and Delbanco. There were also regular showings at Loggia Gallery and Mall Galleries, as well as inclusion in mixed sponsored events, such as Westminster Arts Festival open air exhibition in Berkley Square (1972) and the Royal Festival Hall B.P. Oil Sculpture Exhibition (1990). Glenn Hellman received his first public commission at the age of 27 and also showed with Roland Browse and Delbanco as well as Leicester Galleries, yet his profile diminished in the 1980s. Fortunately, a revival of interest in his coiled structures in recent years has resulted in a new and equally energetic body of work culminating in Bop from 2013. Deborah van der Beek is clearly in line for greater recognition with inventive imagery and characteristic construction; her work is now cast by Pangolin and is represented by the Paisnel Gallery. These three artists and others endorsed in this catalogue represent an opportunity to acquire superlative examples of British sculpture at a fraction of the price of their peers and mentors. Stephen Paisnel September 2013
Index of Artists and Catalogue Numbers Adams, Robert
1
Ayrton, Michael
2
Barker, Clive Clarke, Geoffrey Clatworthy, Robert Davies, John
5, 6, 7 8, 9, 10, 11 12
De Quin, Robert
13, 14, 15
Hellman, Glenn
16, 17, 18, 19
King, Peter
20
Kneale, Bryan
21
Leonard, Keith
22
Lovell, Margaret
23
Milne, John
24, 25
Mitchell, Denis
26, 27
Mount, Paul Thursby, Peter Van der Beek, Deborah
Original Poster showing Endoc (1978) from exhibition at Newlyn Art Gallery, Penzance, November 1985
3, 4
28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33 34 35, 36, 37, 38
Wall, Brian
39, 40
Wells, Donald
41, 42
Robert Adams
1917–1984
During the final decade of Adams’ career, the period between the mid-1970s and mid-1980s, the Northampton born and trained sculptor issued many small but formally intriguing monolithic bronze sculpture like Shell Form (cat 1). With their deft, subtle surfaces swelling from a given plane, and alternatively polished or patinated in a manner creating further counterpoint, formal and textural variety and even suggested pictorial imagery, these bronzes contained organic associations with natural phenomena, such as plants or, as here, with sea shells. Adams’ biographer the art historian Alastair Grieve refers to the present work being “aptly titled, for it does indeed recall a seashell”.1 Furthermore, the subject surely reflects his professional and social links with St. Ives, the Cornish art centre where he had many friends and where Adams spent much time during the mid-1970s. Though late, Shell Form contains, in terms of its streamlined forms and closely worked surfaces, qualities endemic to all phases of Adams’ delicately poised work. Adams’ early statement in Lawrence Alloway’s landmark book, Nine Abstract Artists talked about how, “the material is synonymous with the idea”.2 At this early juncture in Adams’ burgeoning career the influential critic Alloway explained how Adams was “exceptional among the younger sculptors in that he is not only an assembler and a modeller but also a carver”.3 All three fundamental approaches are literally or subliminally evident in Shell Form.
1 2 3
Alastair Grieve, The Sculpture of Robert Adams, Lund Humphries, 1992, page 139 Lawrence Alloway, Nine Abstract Artists, Tiranti, London, 1954, page 21 Ibid.
Cat No 1
Shell Form polished bronze on wood base stamped with signature and dated 1980 number 4 from an edition of 6 Opus 396 12 x 14 ins (30.5 x 35.5 cms) ProveNaNCe
The Artist’s Estate Gimpel Fils, London Private Collection 2005–2013 exhibited
New York, Gimpel & Weitzenhoffer Gallery, Robert Adams, 4 April – 2 May 1981, cat no 5 (another cast) London, Gimpel Fils, Late Bronzes, 15 September – 15 October 1988, cat no 26, illustrated on catalogue cover Literature
Alastair Grieve, The Sculpture of Robert Adams, Lund Humphries, 1992, cat no 665, illustrated page 139
Michael Ayrton
1921–1975
Michael Ayrton, a prolific painter and sculptor as well as critic, broadcaster and novelist, possessed a fertile imagination and with it a plastic versatility. Like Picasso, Ayrton’s overflowing output crossed the interdisciplinary divide. Also like Picasso the English artist drew on classical legend and myth which, in this instance, sees him adopt the Icarus theme. The medium of the bronze relief was therefore perfect for Ayrton since it links pictorial flatness with sculptural projection. Furthermore, the sculpture is mounted on two legs thereby investing the fractured and indented bronze rectangle above with the subliminal status of a torso. This textured and perforated bronze plane is, however, palpably wing-like and from within its ribbed, gossamer surface, the figure of the birdman emerges. Ayrton alighted on the Icarus theme after a trip to Cumae, Bay of Naples in 1956. From 1959 onwards the artist pursued the subject in both two and three dimensional work. Indeed, during the early 1960s when Icarus Pierced Relief (cat 2) was created, he pushes the theme to the outer limits of his imagination, interpreting Icarus’ action of fatally flying too close to the sun as part of a doomed sexual attack on Apollo. He developed aspects of the story in terms of bulky free-standing figures, tactile wax reliefs and drawings. By the mid-1960s Ayrton completed his Icarus work with a series of Icarus Rising bronzes but soon moved on to the related theme of Daedalus.
Cat No 2
Icarus Pierced Relief bronze number 5 from an edition of 9 conceived and cast in 1961 14¼ x 14¾ ins (36 x 37.5 cms) ProveNaNCe
Private Collection 1992–2012 exhibited
London, Matthiesen Gallery, 1961, cat no 48 (another cast) New York, James Goodman Gallery, 1963, cat no 11 (another cast) London, Austin Desmond & Phipps, 1992 Literature
Jacob E Nyenhuis, Myth and the Creative Process: Michael Ayrton and the Myth of Daedalus, the Myth Maker, 2003, cat no 205, illustrated figure 45
Clive Barker Cat No 3
Two Torches polished aluminium stamped with signature and dated 2000 unique 13 x 11 ins (33 x 28 cms) ProveNaNCe
Whitford Fine Art 2001 Private Collection 2001–2013 Literature
Ann Jo Fermon, Clive Barker: Sculpture. Catalogue Raisonné 1958–2000, 2003, cat no 405, illustrated page 176
Born 1940
The sculptor Clive Barker came to prominence during the early 1960s. Like Jasper Johns, Claes Oldenburg and Jann Haworth, Barker became one of a rare breed − a pop sculptor addressing the solid object as opposed to the graphics-based pop painters dealing with cartoons, advertising and so on. Working at Vauxhall Motors at the turn of the 1960s Barker was impressed by automatic assembly line procedures and sparkling uniformity. He transferred these qualities into his gleaming chrome-plated bronze sculptures. Key works, such as Van Gogh’s Chair (1966) and Splash (1967), were iconographic parodies, arty and jokey by nature. Later that decade he became established exhibiting through Robert Fraser and Erica Brausen, now legendary art dealers who gave him landmark solos at the Fraser and Hanover Galleries, respectively. During Barker’s later career there is a Duchampian return to the found object, unadorned and naked in its take-me-as-youfind-me candidness. Two Torches (cat 3) and Space Pilot X-Ray Gun (cat 4) are self-evidently everyday consumer objects sensually transferred into shiny aluminium. An early supporter Sir Roland Penrose described how the, “fascination of Clive Barker’s sculpture lies not only in metamorphosis and the significance he gives to objects otherwise unpleasing or banal but also in the impact of truth-exposed with precision”. These aluminiums bear out Penrose’s observation, made as long ago as the mid 1970s, that Barker’s works “are no longer parodies of other artists but rather his own considered comments on life as he finds it”.1
1
Roland Penrose Heads and Chariots essay for ‘Heads’ exhibition Anthony d’Offay Gallery, London 1974
Cat No 4 Cat no. 3: Two Torches (detail)
Clive Barker
Space Pilot X-Ray Gun polished aluminium stamped with signature number 4 from an edition of 9 cast in 1998 4½ x 8½ ins (11.5 x 21.5 cms) ProveNaNCe
Whitford Fine Art c. 2001 Private Collection 2001–2013 Literature
Ann Jo Fermon, Clive Barker: Sculpture. Catalogue Raisonné 1958–2000, 2003, cat no 330, illustrated page 158
Cat no. 4: Space Pilot X-Ray Gun (detail)
Geoffrey Clarke
Born 1924
By the mid-1960s, Geoffrey Clarke, who had risen to international prominence at the 1952 Venice Biennale as one of the so-called “geometry of fear” group, had moved from an early use of forged iron to one of casting in aluminium from expanded polystyrene. Angle and Slab (cat 5) benefits from simple robust forms, a smooth finish and silvery grey colours afforded by this industrial process. So at home did Clarke become with this cold metal that Judith le Grove, an acknowledged author on Clarke, explained how, “an innovative technique of casting made him perhaps the most frequently commissioned sculptor of the post-war period”.1 During the early 1960s Clarke had made wall reliefs for P&O Liners but with Table (cat 6) the intention is to conjure a mini environment in a manner recalling the surreal early work of Giacometti. The small free-standing aluminium Head (cat 7) has a flat relief-like surface made up of symbols of a mysterious biomorphic kind, relating perhaps to an arm, head or torso. The small aluminium Table is, by contrast, a flat square relief, a tableau containing curved or low-lying organic elements. The solo exhibition at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, aptly called, “Symbols for Man: Sculpture & Graphic Work 1949–1994” toured the UK from December 1994 to May 1995 and featured many reliefs. During the following decade Clarke enjoyed two Fine Art Society solo shows celebrating, not only his spikey earlier repertoire, but indeed his changing and exploratory prints with their myriad imaginative graphic ideas that proved such rich sources for his sculpture.
1
Judith le Grove, A Sculptor’s Prints, Sansom & Co, Bristol, 2012, page 8
Cat No 5
Angle and Slab aluminium stamped with initials number 1 from an edition of 10 circa 1964 3¼ x 6¾ (8 x 17 cms) Literature
Peter Black, Symbols for Man: Sculpture & Graphic Work 1949–1994, Ipswich Borough Council Museums and Galleries in association with Lund Humphries, 1994, (illustrated front cover)
Cat No 6
Cat No 7
Geoffrey Clarke
Geoffrey Clarke
Table
Head
aluminium stamped with initials and dated ‘94 number 5 from an edition of 10 3½ x 5½ ins (9 x 14 cms)
aluminium signed with initials an edition of 10, cast in 1990 8 x 5 ins (20.3 x 12.7 cms)
exhibited
London, Fine Art Society, Geoffrey Clarke: Sculpture Constructions and Works on Paper 1949–2000, 9 October – 2 November 2000, cat no 76, illustrated page 53
Robert Clatworthy Cat No 8
Bull bronze signed with initials conceived and cast in 1956 number 6 from an edition of 8 7¾ x 13½ ins (19.6 x 34.3 cms) exhibited
London, Hanover Gallery, Robert Clatworthy, 4 September – 28 September 1957, cat no 4, illustrated (another cast) Literature
The Tate Gallery: Illustrated Catalogue of Acquisitions 1982–84, Tate Gallery Publications, 1986, cat no T03714, illustrated page 123 (another cast) Keith Chapman (ed.), Robert Clatworthy: Sculpture and Drawings, Sansom & Company, 2012, cat RC33, illustrated pages 28 and 95 (another cast)
Born 1928
In 1995, at a relatively late stage of Clatworthy’s career, the art historian and former Tate director Sir Alan Bowness wrote how Clatworthy had originally, “made his reputation with the life-size bull” shown at the Holland Park sculpture exhibition in 1957. The subject of the bull is replete with art historical significance, not least in Picasso’s multi-facetted art, but as far as the young Slade trained British sculptor was concerned the theme stood as a metaphor carrying as Bowness went on to declare, “an emotional charge that is translated into human terms”.1 The pitted, craggy surfaces of a fiercely fingered and modelled bronze identifies with the libidinous sexual energy and untamed wildness of the beast. The bovine theme that gave Clatworthy his early success was suggested by observing a bull in a field near his Guestling Green studio in East Sussex. The original large 1953 plaster bull was later cast in 1959 and permanently installed in July 1961 at the Alton Estate in South West London. In 1998 the bronze landmark was given Grade II status by the Department of Culture, Media and Sport. Between 1953 and 1957, the period of Clatworthy’s spectacular ascendency from Slade student to established Hanover Gallery exhibitor, Clatworthy produced several bull sculptures including the present example (cat 8) in varying sizes. The Tate acquired a bull in 1959 and, five years later, one was illustrated in Herbert Read’s influential A Concise History of Modern Sculpture. Jon Wood has transcended the bull’s link to Picasso’s art by describing, “something peculiarly British about Clatworthy’s bulls, a post Festival of Britain image of defiance that bespeaks national regeneration through farming”.2 Bridgewater born, Clatworthy’s background may, in this regard, be relevant.
1 2
Keith Chapman (ed.), Robert Clatworthy. Sculpture and Drawings, Sansom & Company, 2012, page 27 Ibid. page 12
Robert Clatworthy
Born 1928
By the early 1960s Robert Clatworthy, having established a significant reputation as a notable young sculptor during the previous decade with a series of acclaimed bull, horse rider and cat bronzes, began to engage with the single human figure. As with the earlier animal pieces these are tactile and expressively modelled and relate to the powerful precedent of the Swiss-born Parisian Giacometti’s post-war sculpture. Upright with singularly emphatic presence, Standing Figure (cat 9) is an inert, frontal statue embodying movement and energy not through posture or animated subject but in terms of agitated, use of materials – in this case plaster or bronze. Having left the Hanover Gallery, Clatworthy would successfully show these new figure sculptures in a 17-work exhibition at the Waddington Gallery in April 1965. Six walking figures were included, which Frank Whitford described as, “more substantial than Giacometti’s, but very similar in intention and effect”.1 This sentiment was echoed nearly 25 years later when critic Mary Rose Beaumont estimated that, “although less anorexic than Giacometti’s, Clatworthy’s figures nevertheless inspire one with a similar foreboding”.2 Through means true to the medium of sculpture, Clatworthy followed Giacometti in touching on the inherent loneliness and isolation of the human condition in a godless universe. A salutary sensuality and physicality rescue the pieces from anonymity. Clatworthy’s sell-out Waddington show was accompanied by his being featured in the Tate Gallery’s epoch defining, “British Sculpture in the Sixties” where two Standing Women plasters were shown. At this important point, therefore, the solitary human figure devoid of social narrative or literary association became his main mid-sixties metaphor.
1 2
Keith Chapman (ed.), Robert Clatworthy: Sculpture and Drawings, Sansom & Company, 2012, page 30 Ibid. page 24
Cat No 9
Standing Figure bronze signed number 1 from an edition of 8 conceived and cast in 1963 15 x 7½ ins (38 x 19 cms) exhibited
London, Waddington Galleries, Robert Clatworthy, 1965 (another cast) Literature
Keith Chapman (ed.), Robert Clatworthy: Sculpture and Drawings, Sansom & Company, 2012, cat RC65, illustrated page 109 (another cast)
Cat No 10
Horse and Rider bronze conceived and cast in 1955 1st cast from an edition of 8 20 x 22½ ins (50.8 x 57 cms) exhibited
London, Hanover Gallery, Robert Clatworthy, 1957, cat no 1 Literature
Keith Chapman (ed.), Robert Clatworthy: Sculpture and Drawings, Sansom & Company, 2012, cat RC26, illustrated page 91
Robert Clatworthy
Cat No 11
The horse and rider theme is popular, timeless and universal and links the human and animal worlds. The intelligence of the former guides the brute physical power of the latter. Through it Clatworthy engages both with the work of the leading postwar Italian sculptor Marino Marini and with his own exact contemporary, friend and teaching colleague Elisabeth Frink. The expressionistically modelled mid-1950s Horse and Rider (cat 10), with its piled up mound of clay or plaster, contrasts with the smoother finish of the recent 2007 Horse and Rider 1 (cat 11) bronze. Similarly, the craggy rawness and galloping pose of the former contrasts with the gentle trot of the later variation.
Horse and Rider 1
Horse and Eagle, from the mid 1980s situated outside Charing Cross Hospital, Hammersmith took the emotive horse and rider theme to its ultimate, large-scale conclusion.
bronze signed with initials on base number 3 from an edition of 9 dated 2007 12 x 10½ ins (30.5 x 26.6 cms) Literature
Keith Chapman (ed.), Robert Clatworthy: Sculpture and Drawings, Sansom & Company, 2012, cat RC160, illustrated page 153 (another cast)
John Davies
Born 1946
Throughout the so-called “post-modern” era much art has been concerned with revived figuration reacting against the introspective or anthropomorphic abstraction of the post-war period. Instead, many artists have been seduced by plastic or hyper real surfaces in a quest to hold up a mirror to the world as they find it. Manchester and Slade-trained John Davies has pursued verisimilitude as a virtue, as in Head T.P. (cat 12), originally shown at an important early Marlborough Fine Art solo exhibition, the artist opts for a frontal gaze that is inertly classical. The painted polyester face is awake and lively and interacts in an almost symbiotic accord with the onlookers. The facial expression gives no clue as to narrative. Though classical, Davies’ “Heads” use the materials and processes of popular, synthetic culture. The London-based sculptor spoke of the human head as having, “carried me closer to people”1 and his use of differing scales creates psychological effects to do with propinquity or distance. In common with photorealist painters of heads, such as Chuck Close, Davies is interested in the interface between artifice and reality. Two Whitechapel Art Gallery solo shows during the first half of the 1970s launched the public career of a sculptor who has, during the intervening forty years, continued to use the head in an unnerving but deeply empathetic way.
1
Sue Hubbard, Sculpture at Goodwood: A Vision for Twenty-First Century British Sculpture. A Celebration of the First Ten Years, Sculpture at Goodwood, 2002, page 344
Cat No 12
Head – T.P. painted polyester 1983–84 unique 15½ ins (39.4 cms) exhibited
London, Marlborough Fine Art, John Davies Recent Sculpture and Drawings, 11 May – 23 June 1984, cat no 31, illustrated
Robert de Quin
1927–2002
Belgium-born de Quin trained after the war at the Hornsey School of Arts and Crafts in London. He was a natural craftsman with metal which he “modelled” in an intriguing neo-constructivist way. The result was not, however, a minimal stasis or purist geometry but, as in Echo, (cat 13) from 1966, features complex and poetic configurations with plenty of spatial interplay. The curved steel “wall” in Echo is like a theatrical backdrop allowing variously titled vertical “ribbons” of steel to inhabit the shallow space in front. Perforated with repeated circles these “ribbons” are decorative and as such belong to the sixties with its hedonistic geometry and op-art style of Bridget Riley and Victor Vasarely. By the early 1970s de Quin had established a teaching career and membership of the Free Painters and Sculptors group with whom he would regularly exhibit at London’s Loggia Gallery. The different “look” of 70’s art registered in de Quin’s work in terms of the horizontal Strata’s (cat 14) use of copper and bronze alongside steel. This created a rich and varied surface patina as differing metallic colour vied across a sweeping, allusively suggestive structure. In 1992 with the aptly named Majestic Bird (cat 15) de Quin returned to his favoured steel which was fashioned with the cheeky baroque energy of Picasso. He alludes to the plumage, hooks and thin legs using an abstract language of truncated steel bars and rods.
Cat No 13
Echo steel signed and dated 1966 unique 28¾ x 19½ ins (73 x 49.5 cms) ProveNaNCe
Acquired directly from the artist’s family exhibited
London, Loggia Gallery, Free Painters and Sculptors, 22 April – 12 May 1995, cat no 19
Cat No 14
Cat No 15
Robert de Quin
Robert de Quin
Strata
Majestic Bird
steel, copper and bronze stamped with signature and dated ‘71 unique 7½ x 26 ins (19 x 66 cms)
steel signed and dated 1992 unique 27 x 18¼ ins (68.5 x 46.3 cms)
ProveNaNCe
ProveNaNCe
Acquired directly from the artist’s family
Acquired directly from the artist’s family
exhibited
exhibited
London, Loggia Gallery, Free Painters and Sculptors, 21 August – 9 September 1994, cat no 50
London, Loggia Gallery, Free Painters and Sculptors, 17 August – 6 September 1996, cat no 38 London, Loggia Gallery, Free Painters and Sculptors, 16 August – 5 September 1997, cat no 18 Birmingham, Royal Birmingham Society of Artists’ Gallery, Works by the Free Painters and Sculptors, 1997, cat no 80
Glenn Hellman Cat No 16
Screwsail bronzed steel stamped with signature and dated 1972 unique 20½ x 25 ins (52 x 63.5 cms) ProveNaNCe
Acquired directly from the artist
Born 1938
Glenn Hellman studied at Hornsey College of Art at a time during the early 1960s when, despite preceding the seismic period of student revolt later that decade, art schools were lively and creative hotbeds. Hellman left college with a bang, winning a national competition to make a commissioned sculpture for the new Merrion Centre in Leeds, his large abstract configuration Androgyne, which was completed in 1965. His early career, though interrupted by National Service, is also notable for Hellman’s three solo exhibitions with the leading London galleries Roland, Browse and Delbanco and the Leicester Galleries. Though often mere whimsical afterthoughts, in some ways Hellman’s titles attached to the realised sculpture are suggestive of a metaphorical layer. The simplicity of Screwsail (cat 16), which carries a sail-like metal form, is akin to a practical nautical object; it is indeed almost a case of form following function. Among Hornsey’s staff to have inspired Hellman was Neil Stocker, a former Henry Moore assistant who impressed in Hellman at an early stage the need for each work to have its own internal structure. This is Screwsail’s beauty, the structural engineering an overt and pleasing aspect both from a practical and aesthetic viewpoint.
Glenn Hellman
Born 1938
The open, curvilinear bronze forms of Spring Washer (cat 17) and Meiosis (cat 18) create a simulation of the pent-up energy of a metal spring. The pieces also seem to possess a calligraphic spontaneity yet at the same time share with Bop (cat 19) an engineered poise and balance. When confronting a new sculpture Hellman describes how, “you have to think about the whole”.1 He does so in Bop by subverting a circular welded bronze form with a “keyhole” channel and curled edges at base allowing the piece to stand its ground. Hellman also uses colour to emphasise front and back – a painted black and a honey matt bronze, respectively. An important factor in influencing Hellman’s masterful conflation of practical structure and simplicity of artistic form is his mid-1960s period assisting in Robert Adams’ Hampstead studio. Nothing superfluous ever interested Adams’ sculpture; in 1954 he told leading art critic Lawrence Alloway that, “the material is synonymous with the idea, and one must therefore conceive the idea in terms of the material”.2 Such a stricture guided Hellman through a discreetly productive and creatively engaging career.
1 2
Peter Davies in conversation with the artist July 2013 Lawrence Alloway, Nine Abstract Artists, Tiranti, 1954, page 21
Cat No 17
Spring Washer painted steel stamped with signature and dated 1978 unique 8 x 8 ins (20.3 x 20.3 cms) ProveNaNCe
Acquired directly from the artist
Cat No 18
Cat No 19
Glenn Hellman
Glenn Hellman
Meiosis
Bop
bronze stamped with signature and dated 1997 unique 9½ x 14 ins (24 x 35.5 cms)
welded bronze stamped with signature and dated ‘13 unique 8 x 10¼ ins (20.3 x 26 cms)
ProveNaNCe
ProveNaNCe
Acquired directly from the artist
Acquired directly from the artist
Peter King
1928–1957
Like Gaudier Brzeska at the auspicious dawn of the modern sculpture revolution, Peter King packed much creative energy into a short but dramatic life. Trained at the Wimbledon School of Art during the 1940s, he became an assistant to the sculptor, Sir Charles Wheeler in his London studio and then, after National Service in the RAF, worked as an assistant alongside Anthony Caro in Henry Moore’s “Hoglands” studio in Hertfordshire. By the mid-1950s he was teaching at St. Martins School of Art and was married with two children. Two solo shows at Victor Musgrave’s avant-garde Gallery One in Soho during the mid-1950s led to a Boise Travelling Scholarship to France and Italy where solo exhibitions would follow.
Cat No 20
Boat painted wood circa 1956 12 x 46½ ins (30.5 x 118 cms) ProveNaNCe
Private Collection, c.2008 – 2013 exhibited
London, England & Co, Peter King 1928–1957: Retrospective, 14 March – 12 April 2008, illustrated on front cover Literature
A bohemian in lifestyle − he lived with painter Alan Davie in a North London commune − and an arch experimenter in sculpture, King cut a somewhat unsettled figure in the drab, austere post-war period. The dramatic sculpture produced during his short career reflects this profound restlessness. Mike King described his father’s work as at, “an intersection between the atavistic and the modernist”.1 It was exactly in these terms Caro remembered his work as, “original and forward looking”.2 In tune with his primitive and surrealist interests King worked in a spontaneous, uninhibited and improvisatory way and these qualities show through in Boat (cat 20) a whimsical and mysterious piece of wood carving. Two smaller bronze versions of Boat were also produced in the mid-1950s.
1 2
Foreword by Anthony Caro, Peter King 1928–1957: Retrospective, England & Co, 14 March – 12 April, 2008, page 3 Ibid. page 3
Peter King reference: PEK 0159
Bryan Kneale Cat No 21
Ring Sculpture 1 brass on wood base stamped with signature conceived in 1976 unique 15½ x 10 ins (39.3 x 25.4 cms) ProveNaNCe
Redfern Gallery, London Private Collection 1976–2013
Born 1930
Bryan Kneale studied art at the Douglas School of Art and then at the Royal Academy Schools during the late 1940s and early 1950s. A move into sculpture in the early 1960s soon secured him a position as Head of Sculpture at Hornsey College of Art and Design in 1968. He became a Royal Academician in 1974 and distinguished himself in art education becoming, among many other things, Professor of Sculpture at the Royal College of Art throughout the 1980s and Head of Sculpture from 1985 to 1990. Public commissions include Portsmouth Cathedral, Manx Government Building and Westminster Cathedral. Not unusual for a sculptor, Kneale first studied painting but soon found the need to extend into the third dimension. Turning his hand to sculpture he did so with an enhanced feeling for thin lines (metal bars) or planes (sheet steel) freely moving through space. An early, even pioneering, welder in post-war avant-garde British sculpture, Kneale was akin to Anthony Caro in enjoying a kind of spatial drawing which we see in the almost calligraphic concision and immediacy of this unique work from 1976, Ring Sculpture 1 (cat 21). The main circular “ring” creates a spatial void at the top of which other elements, oval and linear in nature, “dance” away.
Keith Leonard
1921–1993
Keith Leonard, a modest religious man, invested a mainly geometrical language of sculptural form with allusion to the human body. At the Slade School, where he studied during the early 1950s, Birmingham-born Leonard followed Professor Gerrard’s strictures in modelling the human head or figure in terms of a point-to-point precision and of a disciplined articulation of volume in relation to surrounding space. The academicism of this analytical approach to form in the round held him in good stead, even if his subsequent abstract work preferred flat or curvilinear abstract planes interweaving through space. His studies in Paris under the well-known Russian École de Paris sculptor Ossip Zadkine no doubt helped in this direction. In the sparkling and reflective bronze monolith Male and Female (cat 22) Leonard follows Brancusi’s seminal The Kiss in creating a two-in-one configuration. Formally integrated with its compacted post-cubist planes, the object also carries metaphoric and symbolic meaning, namely the touching intimacy between, and unity of, embracing male and female protagonists. Originally modelled in plaster in 1953 − the period between his Slade studies and taking up employment at Barbara Hepworth’s St. Ives studio where he worked during the second half of the 1950s − the sculpture was not finally cast until the 1980s and then only as a single cast. After a long teaching career which saw him become Head of Sculpture at Sunderland School of Art and later Farnham School of Art, Leonard retired to St. Ives during the 1980s.
Cat No 22
Male and Female bronze signed, dated 1953 and titled on base conceived in an edition of 9, only one cast 16 ins (40.6 cms) ProveNaNCe
Wills Lane Gallery where purchased by the previous owner Literature
Peter Davies, After Trewyn: St. Ives Sculptors since Hepworth, Old Bakehouse Publications, 2001, illustrated page 77
Margaret Lovell
Born 1939
During the late 1960s Lovell, having returned to her native Bristol after the Slade and subsequent lecturing in Portsmouth, modelled abstracted head forms inspired by Brancusi as well as a series based on billowing sails or leafs. In 1968 her solo Marjorie Parr Gallery exhibition on Chelsea’s Kings Road was a near sell-out; it was followed by a solo at the Park Square Gallery in Leeds. The Northern art critic for The Guardian, Merete Bates spoke of Lovell’s, “elemental sense of form”.1 Lovell indeed made her abstract shapes echo, but not directly describe, nature’s shapes. In this instance simplicity of conception – wafer-thin leaf forms – were ideally linked to refinement of execution in these deft, subtly inflected monoliths. Lovell’s youthful promise during the 1960s drew a chorus of critical approval, the Arts Review’s Susan Groom declaring, “a new strength in simplicity”2 in 1967 and The Mirror’s David Clemens seeing Lovell, “becoming one of Britain’s most popular young artists”3 the following year. It is a mark of Lovell’s versatility that she could wrestle out of thin bronze planes the sensation of space, light and movement. Like Spinnaker, her large outdoor commissioned bronze for the Great Ouse Water Authority at Grafham Water in Huntingdon (1969), Leaf Form (cat 23) uses fluttering planes to create clear analogies with the organic growth or movement of natural forms. She made many variations on the leaf thereafter.
1 2 3
The Guardian 11/11/67 Peter Davies, Margaret Lovell: Sculptor, Sansom & Company, 2009, page 43 Ibid. page 48
Cat No 23
Leaf Form bronze on slate base signed with monogram ML and on base number 6 from an edition of 9 conceived and cast in 1968 19¼ ins (49 cms) exhibited
London, Marjorie Parr Galleries, Margaret Lovell, 1972, cat no 8 Literature
Peter Davies, Margaret Lovell: Sculptor, Sansom & Company, 2009, illustrated page 52 (another cast)
John Milne Cat No 24
Project cold cast bronze signed with initials and dated 1969 unique 21½ ins (54.6 cms) Literature
Peter Davies, The Sculpture of John Milne, Belgrave Gallery, 2000, cat no JM90, page 77
1931–1978
During the late 1960s Milne, based in St. Ives and a wallto-wall neighbour of Barbara Hepworth, for whom he had previously worked, enjoyed a busy exhibiting schedule. His solo Marjorie Parr show that year culminated in his careerdefining retrospective at Plymouth City Art Gallery in 1971. The pronounced verticality of Project (cat 24) was shared by the contemporaneous sculpture Totemic and later by the 1971 Poseidon series. Though cast in an aluminium edition of nine, this cold cast bronze, Project is unique. Its “organic” tangled, petal-like base rises into a perfectly vertical “stem”, as much tower evoking or architectural as plant-like. The important critic Bryan Robertson, a steadfast supporter of the St. Ives-based sculptor, observed how Milne’s works was, “often mysterious, but only in origin, never in its concrete sculptural identity”.1 In other words Milne’s avowed interest in the exotic forms of plants, landscape or ancient architecture never subverted the formal disciplines and integrity of his work as a modern abstracting sculptor. In fact the former Whitechapel Art Gallery director Robertson went on to describe Project’s “rigidly clamping petals” 2 rising up into the tall central column.
1 2
Bryan Robetson, John Milne. One-Man Retrospective, Plymouth City Art Gallery 1971 Ibid.
John Milne
1931–1978
The early 1970s was the productive high point of Milne’s career. A large retrospective at Plymouth City Art Gallery in June 1971 was his most important lifetime show. After Plymouth, Milne made trips to Turkey and Morocco, where he was inspired both by the landscape and the ancient archaeological sites, subjects that inspired the imagery of his otherwise streamlined abstract sculpture. At his solo Marjorie Parr Chelsea exhibition during the spring 1972, 36 sculptures were accompanied by as many as 10 reliefs proving how important this medium was in bringing to the fore his natural graphic panache. The critic Bernard Denvir, reviewing the Parr show, talked of the, “allusive quality which we see clearly here”.1 In this allusive mode, Milne described Morocco as, “predominantly the land of the desert, the sun and mountains” 2 and these qualities inspired the wavy, undulating forms of Atlas and Sahara Forms. In the exquisitely detailed polished bronze tablet Marrakech (cat 25) however, he appears to have expressed Islamic architecture with its columns, recesses, domed window and grooved channels. Though small, this beautiful relief is a full bronze in distinction to a large version of Marrakech, which is in cold cast bronze, a less pure and durable material.
1 2
Bernard Denvir, Studio International, 20 May 1972 Peter Davies, The Sculpture of John Milne, Belgrave Gallery, 2000, page 34
Cat No 25
Marrakech bronze signed with initials and dated 1972 number 1 from an edition of 9 3¼ x 3¾ ins (8 x 9.5 cms) ProveNaNCe
Marjorie Parr Studio Sale 1996 Private Collection 1996–2013 Literature
J.P. Hodin, John Milne: Sculptor − Life and Work, Latimer New Dimensions, 1977, cat no 28, illustrated (another version) Peter Davies, The Sculpture of John Milne, Belgrave Gallery, 2000, illustrated page 83 (another version)
Denis Mitchell
1912–1993
Between 1949 and 1960 Mitchell, hitherto a market gardener, fisherman, miner and painter of slightly naïve Cornish landscapes, was chief assistant to Barbara Hepworth in St. Ives. The Welsh-raised sculptor was closely involved in the preparation of many of her now famous wood and stone carvings during her great period of post-war ascendency to worldwide prominence. Endemic to the sculpture of Mitchell is a use of tall, spiralling or streamlined shapes that refer to the tools of his trade. Trevail 2 (cat 26) is one such tall, sleek upright bronze in which swelling or tapering, straight or curved surfaces complicate and provide gyrating resonance to what is otherwise a simple, perfectly upright monolith. The high polish distorts reflected light thereby adding further to the veneer of surface complexity.
Cat No 26
Trevail 2 bronze on slate base signed with initials, titled & dated 1960 44½ ins (113 cms) ProveNaNCe
Redfern Gallery 1961 Private Collection 1961–2013 Literature
Swansea, Glynn Vivian Art Gallery and Museum, Festival Exhibition of Sculpture by Denis Mitchell, 6 October – 3 November 1979, illustrated
Denis Mitchell
1912–1993
By 1970 having left Hepworth’s employment as senior assistant, Denis Mitchell had established himself as a leading sculptor. Solo exhibitions during the 1960s at Waddingtons (1961), Redfern Gallery (1962) and Marjorie Parr (1967 and 1969) had put him on the map. The labour intensive nature of Mitchell’s works was highlighted in Patricks Heron’s catalogue for the sculptor’s Marjorie Parr solo in 1969. Describing his friend’s work as, “hand carved metal”, Heron went on to explain how, “a Mitchell can only come into existence under the direct physical touch of the sculptor’s hands”.1 Gurnic (cat 27) was produced shortly after Mitchell moved from St. Ives to Newlyn, where he spent the rest of his productive life sharing a studio with the artist John Wells. A number of new bronzes at the outset of the 1970s, while adhering to Mitchell’s predilection for slimness and uprightness, also presented themselves like mysterious sentinels.
1
Patrick Heron, Denis Mitchell essay for “Denis Mitchell” exhibition Marjorie Parr Galleries, London, 6 February – 1 March 1969
Cat No 27
Gurnic bronze on slate base signed with initials and dated ‘70 titled, signed & dated on base number 4 from an edition of 6 11¼ x 3½ ins (28.5 x 9 cms) exhibited
The British Council, Denis Mitchell: An Exhibition of Sculpture and Drawings, 1973, cat no 12, page 14, touring to – Malta, Cyprus, Greece, Yugoslavia, Malaysia, Indonesia, New Zealand and Korea Swansea, Glynn Vivian Art Gallery and Museum, Festival Exhibition of Sculpture by Denis Mitchell, 6 October – 3 November 1979, cat no 20, illustrated (another cast)
Paul Mount
1922–2009
Born in Devon in 1922 Paul Mount studied at the Royal College of Art before turning to sculpture. He was deft both manually and conceptually, his formal imagination running seamlessly through dextrous hands. He worked as a design consultant for Borys Group of architects in Nigeria during the late 1950s. Among his designs was an extended concrete wall for a public building project in Lagos. Returning to Britain in 1962, the industrious Mount, aged forty, settled in St. Just, Cornwall. He worked there for most of the next half century and became popular for crisp, concisely constructed stainless steel configurations. Sometimes these were enclosed welded sheet objects but other times, as in the magical Tarantella, (cat 28) they were open playful and unpredictable arrangements of flat or curved steel plate offcuts. Tarantella is the title of an Italian folk dance. As an avowed lover of music, Mount often made visual equivalents of the harmonic arrangements of music. This beautiful and complex sculpture is one of his greatest medium-sized mid-period sculptures, whose leaf-like steel elements that gyrate around a central steel “stem” or “spine” have something of the versatility of a Kenneth Martin mobile. Encouraging audience participation as part of a conceived “democratisation” of the art experience, these elements can be rotated on their linear axes.
Cat No 28
Tarantella stainless steel on slate base 1980 signed unique 69 ins (175 cms) ProveNaNCe
Beaux Arts, Bath Private Collection to 2012 Literature
Ronald Gaskell, Paul Mount: Sculpture, A Retrospective Selection, Nancherrow Studio, 1981, illustrated plate 1 Ronald Gaskell, Paul Mount: A Selection of Sculpture, 1958–2003, Nancherrow Studio, 2003, illustrated plate 61
Paul Mount Cat No 29
La Gogolla bronze on marble base signed titled on label number 1 from an edition of 5 4½ x 8¼ ins (11.4 x 21 cms)
1922–2009
While stainless steel perhaps became his most familiar material, Mount felt equally at home with bronze. The contrasting materials yield very different results. “My own inclination”, he announced, “is to use materials in their most characteristic way” through what he termed, “an ease of working, stability of structure”.1 The densely packed array of chunky abstract forms in La Gogolla (cat 29) possesses weight, opacity and a ground-based gravitas. They could be a Cornish rock outcrop or a group of quayside bollards. Whatever the sources may be, the forms of La Gogolla are perfectly suited to the patinated bronze in which they are cast. Though also a patinated bronze, String Quartet (cat 30) has a very different vertical orientation and clearly denotes a pair of musicians with instruments. The inherently rectilinear rhythms with their spatial intervals are quintessentially musical in effect. Unlike String Quartet the similarly patinated bronze Recumbent Figure (cat 31) is firmly horizontal and ground-based. In common with Henry Moore, Mount identifies the reclining figure with landscape, the “topography” of meandering limbs and open torsos creating anatomic volume or outlining cavernous voids and open spaces. In Spring Quartet the figure is realised in a more architectural way while the curvilinear movements of Recumbent Figure is more organic. Both, however, achieve what Mount describes as the desired, “sense of precariousness to engender vitality”.2
1 2
Peter Davies, After Trewyn: St Ives Sculptors since Hepworth, Old Bakehouse Publications, 2001, page 102 Ibid. page 104
Cat No 30
Paul Mount
String Quartet bronze on marble base signed edition of 7 cast in 1990 16¼ ins (41.3 cms) ProveNaNCe
Beaux Arts, Bath Private Collection to 2012 Literature
Ronald Gaskell, Paul Mount: A Selection of Sculpture, 1958–2003, Nancherrow Studio, 2003, illustrated plate 49 (another cast)
Cat No 31
Paul Mount
Recumbent Figure bronze signed 6 x 10 ins (15.2 x 25.4 cms)
Cat No 32
Two Forms bronze on slate base signed unique 6¼ ins (16 cms)
Cat No 33
The Inward Eye stainless steel on slate base signed unique, 1988 34 ins (86.3 cms)
Paul Mount
1922–2009
ProveNaNCe
Beaux Arts, Bath Private Collection to 2012
Two Forms (cat 32) leaves this precarious unpredictability behind and opts for the simplicity of a pair of small, polished Hepworthian bronze forms. Even here, though, there is a taut tension courtesy of sweeping stepped surfaces, almost like a sail rippling in wind. Finally, with The Inward Eye (cat 33) we see Mount’s primary stainless steel re-emerge, fashioned with characteristic sensitivity by himself or with help from his Bristol-based master technician, Michael Werbicki. The duet could be a poised pair of figures, probably male and female or, conversely, a pair of sails, a subject surfacing occasionally in his art as a reference to a boyhood love of windjammers off his native Devon coast.
Literature
Ronald Gaskell, Paul Mount: A Selection of Sculpture, 1958–2003, illustrated plate 37
Peter Thursby
Born 1930
This small but compellingly tactile composition, Winged Box Spouts (cat 34) is based on an open box format and features an extruding pipe. The vivid, roughened bronze surfaces conjure industrial associations. The tall tower-like upright plane behind this open box is architectural in feeling though, in terms of its pitted, eroded textures, the sculpture comes across as a decayed, indeed anthropomorphic, relic. Powerful and compact yet partially open to surrounding space this composition comes at a critical moment in the Salisburyborn and Bristol-trained sculptor’s burgeoning career. In 1964, the year this sculpture appeared, Thursby enjoyed the first of three solo exhibitions at the influential Marjorie Parr Gallery in Chelsea. Parr would later open a branch in St. Ives where he continued to exhibit alongside sculptors such as Barbara Hepworth and her assistants, Denis Mitchell, John Milne and Mike Leigh. Key solo exhibitions were held at Bristol’s Arnolfini in 1963 and Plymouth City Art Gallery the following year. Thursby departed from them, however, later pursuing specific corporate and architectural commissions both in Britain and abroad. In response to these, his later works eschews the present work’s textured surfaces for a more streamlined and cerebral quality using the neater material of stainless steel.
Cat No 34
Winged Box Spouts bronze signed with initials 1964 unique 9¼ x 4½ ins (23.5 x 11.5 cms) exhibited
Bath, Anthony Hepworth, Peter Thursby: Sculpture 1963–1965, 2009, cat no 5, illustrated
Deborah van der Beek
Born 1952
As a disaffected art student in Cardiff during the early 1970s, van der Beek took up ceramics, an unwittingly sculptural practice that pointed the way to a later highly successful sculpture career. Gardening and book illustration followed her studies until she left her native London, moved to Wiltshire and never looked back. Inspired by her Bath tutor, Sue Larner, van der Beek made up for lost time with a rapid output. An astonishingly varied and challenging body of bronze sculpture based on human or animal subjects ensued. Cast in bronze from ciment fondue Kouros Reedman (cat 35) contains this talented sculptor’s characteristically obsessive, nervous modelling. The subject is one replete with ancient associations. The upright standing figure also contains discretely collaged surfaces adding to the expressive tactility and symbolic richness of a sculpture conceived in 2008 and cast in 2011 at the pre-eminent Pangolin foundry in Gloucestershire, not far from van der Beek’s Wiltshire base. Van der Beek here emulates the stiff, frontal and inert poses of the ancient Kouroi statues that the Greeks adapted from earlier Egyptian prototypes. Van der Beek was always interested in myth and legend as well as in ancient equestrian sculpture. She described how the “British Museum was my local”.1 An array of maverick processes including the incorporation of all sorts of minor detritus, twigs, berries, bullets and seeds, adds to the symbolic richness of the work, roundly challenging the academic. Cheekily, she casts thatching reeds obtained from a local builder to create the spear across the man’s back.
1
Conversation with Peter Davies 14/6/13
Cat No 35
Kouros Reedman bronze signed number 4 from an edition of 5 conceived in 2008, cast in 2011 36 ins (91.5 cms) ProveNaNCe
Acquired directly from the artist
Deborah van der Beek
Born 1952
Unlike the anonymity of the Kouros figure, Ned Kelly III (cat 36) is a tragic cult character, popularised both by Peter Carey’s book and by the 1969 film starring Mick Jagger, which van der Beek saw as a teenager. A previous boyfriend, the Clash’s Joe Strummer, was equally impressed by the story and inspired van der Beek by giving her his drawing of the Irish Australian outlaw. Furthermore, at the tender age of 21, van der Beek purchased a Sidney Nolan lithograph depicting one of Kelly’s gang members. Her interest in the theme was thus set in stone at an early stage. And soon to be set in bronze. She went on to produce half a dozen variations on the emotive Kelly theme, a metaphor for the persecution of, and prejudice against, outsiders. The artist has described how she, “loved the idea of the Robin Hood figure”.1 In order to conjure the red iron dust of the Australian landscape, van der Beek added a red patina to the bronze finish. The helmet head was cast from a slit tomato puree tin creating a sinister cylindrical mask the smooth rotund surface of which contrasts with the craggy Giacometti-like modelling.
1
Conversation with Peter Davies 14/6/13
Cat No 36
Ned Kelly III bronze signed with initials number 5 from an edition of 7 conceived in 2004, cast in 2012 17¼ x 15½ ins (43.8 x 39.3 cms) ProveNaNCe
Acquired directly from the artist
Deborah van der Beek Cat No 37
King Minos’ Bull silver and bronze signed with initials unique cast in 2012 5 x 7¼ ins (12.7 x 18.5 cm) ProveNaNCe
Acquired directly from the artist
Born 1952
Van der Beek’s penchant for churned, violently modelled, surface is a palpable feature of King Minos’ Bull, (cat 37) a subject recalling early sculptures by Robert Clatworthy, whom she admires. Alert and active - it seems about to charge. The tail is up and echoes the two-pronged silver horns at the other end of the long back. The silver horns add to mythic undertones of King Minos’ Bull. Minos’ refusal to sacrifice the bull incurred the wrath of the gods and led to his wife Pasiphae falling in love with it and the subsequent birth of the human animal hybrid Minotaur. If Clatworthy is a stylistic influence then Michael Ayrton provides a thematic precedent for the younger sculptor in terms of van der Beek’s use of mythological subject matter. The small equestrian bronze Godolphin (cat 38) exchanges the earthy brown patina of the Kelly series for a grey-green finish. The single unmounted horse is animated not only in terms of van der Beek’s customary intrusive modelling but of a gentle trot posture. As often with van der Beek, the equestrian theme stemmed from childhood interests. An early passion for horses led to studies of the equestrian painter George Stubbs’ analytical drawings of the animal’s skeleton and musculature. The artist modelled the rugged form in plaster in 2005 and cast it after a six-year hiatus in 2011.
Cat No 38
Godolphin bronze signed with initials number 6 from an edition of 9 conceived in 2005, cast in 2011 7 x 8½ ins (17.7 x 21.5 cms) ProveNaNCe
Acquired directly from the artist
Brian Wall
Born 1931
By 1961 Brian Wall had returned to his native London from St. Ives, where the self-taught steel sculptor had lived and worked throughout the second half of the 1950s assisting Barbara Hepworth in her St. Ives studio. Following his return to London, Wall increased his steel vocabulary by virtue of accessing urban steel yards. The influential London critic, Norbert Lynton, a keen follower of Wall’s development, described works like One Curve (cat 39) as having had, “the effect of setting into motion forms and relationships that had been tensed but static”1 in his previous work. Group shows at the Drian Gallery, led to two solo exhibitions at the Grabowski Gallery (1962 and 1964) and, by the middle of the decade, to inclusion in the Tate Gallery’s 1965 exhibition British Sculpture in the Sixties. He described more ordered rectilinear compositions of steel bar and plane as “three dimensional Mondrians”.2 They were classical, rather than expressionist in feel and, in contrast to Hepworth’s work, made few concessions to figurative or organic source material.
1 2
Peter Davies, After Trewyn: St Ives Sculptors since Hepworth, Old Bakehouse Publications, 2001, page 73 Ibid. page 67
Cat No 39
One Curve painted steel unique 1961 57½ x 51 ins (146 x 129.5 cms) Literature
Chris Stephens, Brian Wall, Momentum Publishing 2006, illustrated pages 52 and 54
Brian Wall
Born 1931
After settling into a distinguished teaching career, first at the Central School of Art and Design, London, then after emigrating to the United States in 1972, at University of California in Berkeley, Wall developed in sync with Anthony Caro’s environmental minimalism that had made such an impact at the latter’s 1963 Whitechapel retrospective. Caro went on to complicate his sculpture while Wall kept it simple. In Untitled (cat 40) we see this syntactic simplicity in terms of a whittled down steel “box” with two extruding downward and upward diagonals.
Cat No 40
Untitled painted steel unique circa 1966 11 x 13¾ ins (28 x 35 cms) ProveNaNCe
The Artist 1969 Private Collection 1969–2012
Donald Wells
Born 1929
Staffordshire-born Donald Wells came to London as a 30-year old in 1959 and he never looked back, settling permanently in the capital and starting a family. A long and fruitful association with Halima Nalecz’s Drian Gallery was followed by membership of the influential AIA (Artists International Association) which put him in touch with many leading abstract and avant-garde artists. Later, he exhibited with the Free Painters and Sculptors Group, an artist-run organisation of which he became a Committee member. Wells moved freely between painting and sculpture, his geometric or biomorphic forms finding suitable realisation in both two and three dimensions. In the case of the bronze sculpture in the round, the surrealistic Homage to Arp (cat 41), Wells uses a similar “organic” language of form. The overriding influence of the Swiss-born French surrealist Jean Arp is referred to in the title of the gentle swelling 1968 bronze, whereas Homage depended on weighty bulbous bronze shapes for expressive effect.
Cat No 41
Homage to Arp bronze on wood base signed number 1 from an edition of 7 circa 1968 15 x 12¾ ins (38 x 32.4 cms)
Donald Wells Cat No 42
Two Figures aluminium on wood base signed and dated ‘67 10¼ x 6½ ins (26 x 16.5 cms)
Born 1929
The free-standing aluminium relief composition, Two Figures (cat 42) possesses a graphic lightness as the shiny, pristine material of aluminium cuts a striking dancing and meandering profile against surrounding space. Both sculptures stem from Wells’ formative 1960s period, when in full mid-career flow, he produced some of his most original work. It was also a time when he was most creative within a quintessentially vibrant, open and experimental metropolitan art scene.
Cat no. 40: Untitled, Brian Wall
Sculptors of Note and Prospect Modern British Sculpture Published in 2013 by Paisnel Gallery ISBN 978-09558255-8-3
Paisnel Gallery 9 Bury Street St James’s London SW1Y 6AB Telephone: 020 7930 9293 Email: info@paisnelgallery.co.uk www.paisnelgallery.co.uk Š Paisnel Gallery and Peter Davies All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without first seeking the written permission of the copyright holders and of the publisher. Photography: Paul Tucker Photography Design: Alan Ward @ www.axisgraphicdesign.co.uk Print: DeckersSnoeck, Antwerp