Visual Arts

Sculpture has frequently been used as a medium of metamorphosis. Its malleable materials allow fantastic forms to become real as it mixes human, animal and vegetal components. This was never more so than during the late 19th century when many sculptors turned their back on classical notions of anatomy and used sculpture as a vehicle for the imagination.

This exhibition begins with work from the late 19th century and presents a common fascination with the world of the hybrid across the various art movements of the 20th century right up to recent years with the work of Louise Bourgeois. 

'Sirene' - Hans Arp

Figures drawn from classical mythology - sphinxes, chimeras and centaurs - were the stock subjects of late 19th century Salon exhibitions. Meanwhile, outside the gallery, the pressures of industrialisation and of Darwin's theory of evolution provided compelling new contexts for the hybrid. 

To say that sculpture was 'against nature' at this time is to suggest two lines of enquiry: firstly that sculpture could create impossible beings that went beyond the natural order, but which evolution could potentially deliver; secondly, that sculpture presents absurd fantasy creatures by means of realistic modelling so as to suggest their 'real life' existence.

Despite the various positions of each successive avant-garde movement – symbolism, futurism, vorticism, constructivism, surrealism - fantasy sculpture and anatomical reinvention run across them all. Sculptors soon moved from taking on mythological subjects to inventing their own modern monsters, drawing on the machine as much as on myth.

'The Rock Drill' - Jacob Epstein

This exhibition introduces little known sculptors from across Europe and the Americas and places them in a freakish family tree which also includes some of the 'iconic' images of modern sculpture. Thus the exhibition includes works by Hans Arp, Umberto Boccioni, Max Ernst, Julio González and Germaine Richier alongside Thomas Theodor Heine and Dimitri Paciurea. It suggests a new way of looking at the emergence of modern sculpture and at its underlying continuities from the 1890s to the 1980s.

This exhibition is presented in association with the Skulptuur Instituut, Scheveningen in the Netherlands and runs in the Main Galleries, Henry Moore Institute, The Headrow from Thursday 7 February – Sunday 4 May 2008.