Tag: Henry Moore

A New Exhibition Series Celebrates the Visionary Sculptural Practice of Lynn Chadwick

A view of the installation at the Centre des Monuments Nationaux–Hôtel de Sully. Photo: Tanguy Beurdeley. Courtesy of the Lynn Chadwick’s Estate and Perrotin.

British artist Lynn Chadwick was instrumental in liberating modern sculpture from its traditional figurative and celebratory forms, pushing it towards more abstract, innovative expressions. His market remains robust, largely due to the careful management of his estate by his family. Now, “Hypercircle,” a series of exhibitions split into three chapters across two venues, seeks to further cement Chadwick’s reputation and enhance his market standing.

Timed to coincide with Art Basel Paris, the first show, “Hypercircle – Chapter 1: Scalene,” opened at Galerie Perrotin alongside a display of works at the Centre des Monuments Nationaux–Hôtel de Sully. This exhibition focuses on Chadwick’s formative years, showcasing sixty pivotal works produced between 1947 and 1962—a period during which the artist defined his distinct style and gained international recognition. Observer spoke with curator and art historian Matthieu Poirier, who played a central role in orchestrating the show.

Poirier revealed that this exhibition is the culmination of years of dialogue with the Chadwick estate. He first connected with them during research for his groundbreaking “Suspension” exhibition and publication, which looked at artists who pioneered the idea of sculpture beyond the pedestal. Despite some of these pieces not being Chadwick’s most recognized works, the show highlights the artist’s exploration of “Mobiles” in the 1950s. “They are something deeply connected with the history of abstract art,” Poirier said. “It’s about losing boundaries and creating abstraction.”

The Lynn Chadwick exhibition at Perrotin Gallery in Paris was curated by Matthieu Poirer. Photo: Tanguy Beurdeley. Courtesy of the Lynn Chadwick’s Estate and Perrotin.

Chadwick’s fascination with suspension and his intuitive approach to working with unconventional materials were fueled by his diverse background as an architectural draftsman, furniture and textile designer, and later, a pilot in the Fleet Air Arm during World War II. According to Poirier, for the artist, “mobiles were an extension of architecture, moving parts of the architecture. He always had a fascination for flying objects, also for his past as a pilot.”

As Chadwick sought to liberate sculpture from mass and traditional support, his works evolved into more animal-like forms, often featuring angular bodies and delicate, spindly legs. Though deeply abstract and imaginative in their hybrid forms, these sculptures retained some references to the natural world. Poirier noted that Chadwick was fascinated by biology, particularly Darwin’s theory of evolution, with illustrations from those scientific texts inspiring his distinct biomorphic language.

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For this reason, the sculptor’s creations often appear more like fossils suspended between present and past, between remoteness and presentness of their forms, evoking humanoid forms figures with anthropomorphic heads and limbs while maintaining their “otherness.” Many of Chadwick’s pieces also resemble insects, particularly referencing the exoskeleton—a concept that fascinated the artist as he explored the idea of a protective shell or carapace encasing the body structure.

These connections to natural forms and geometries became even more pronounced after Chadwick moved to Lypiatt Park, a neo-Gothic castle in the Cotswolds. From the late 1950s onward, he absorbed inspiration directly from the rich flora and fauna surrounding his new studio. Yet even as his biomorphic tendencies became more apparent, his work continued to blend elements of nature with the mechanical, industrial, and even futuristic, reflecting the aesthetic sensibilities of his time.

“Hypercycle” is a series of exhibitions at several sites, each tracing a part of the artist’s career. Photo: Tanguy Beurdeley. Courtesy of the Lynn Chadwick’s Estate and Perrotin.

Chadwick’s work was never tied to a specific narrative or political stance, which is why Poirier avoided categorizing his pieces by “type” in this exhibition. Instead, he wanted to highlight the artist’s abstract approach, allowing the sculptures to transcend direct references. By pairing the works organically and displaying them as if they were occasionally gathering on pedestals, Poirier emphasizes their fluidity. “They’re always highly stylized and maintain only the main lines of the real thing,” he said.

Some of Chadwick’s monumental sculptures are on display at the Monuments Nationaux–Hôtel de Sully. These pieces, which weigh up to 800 kg, are remarkable not only for their scale but also for the artist’s working method—Chadwick often worked alone and created his sculptures without preliminary sketches, relying on an intuitive and automatic process. Poirier likened this method to surrealist automatic writing, noting that his process had “no plan, leaving the materials leading the way.”

At the same time, Chadwick’s work is deeply rooted in the tradition of sculptural pioneers, from Russian Constructivists like Naum Gabo to Henry Moore, and even the existential sculptures of Alberto Giacometti, where bodies are reduced to their minimal forms. “I’ve always seen him as the missing link between Henry Moore, Giacometti and someone like Louise Bourgeois,” Poirier said, emphasizing the broader significance of Chadwick’s practice. “When you look at her spiders, it’s clear that she looked at Chadwick’s work, and she wasn’t the only one.”

Lynn Chadwick was one of the most significant sculptors of the twentieth century, alongside Alberto Giacometti, Henry Moore and Louise Bourgeois. Photo: Tanguy Beurdeley. Courtesy of the Lynn Chadwick’s Estate and Perrotin.

When compared to Moore and Giacometti, Chadwick’s works convey a similar sense of precariousness and fragility, reflecting the uncertainties of the postwar era. He minimized the base of his sculptures, creating a sense of imbalance and instability through the use of triangular shapes, a key element of his sculptural language. As Poirier explained, this instability wasn’t merely aesthetic but also a means to evoke movement: “The idea of the scalene triangle, this irregular triangle, is an unstable shape that is on the verge of collapsing, not symmetrical. It is not orthogonal. There is no symmetry. It’s just on the verge of falling or giving birth to another triangle or tetrahedron—these shapes imagined from this simple structure.”

The concept of the scalene triangle was so integral to Chadwick’s work that it inspired the title of the first chapter of his exhibition in Paris. Poirier added that this formal approach likely stems from his architectural background, where he learned to stabilize structures using diagonal lines, creating a dynamic interplay between gravitational forces. This architectural influence is evident in the way Chadwick balanced strength and instability within his sculptures.

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Profoundly enigmatic, Chadwick’s hybrid sculptures seem to foreshadow new possibilities of symbiosis between nature and human creation. His concept of “organic growth” within sculpture offers a visionary anticipation of themes such as interspecies relationships and “alienness,” ideas that have become increasingly popular in today’s artistic and creative realms. As humanity is compelled to reconsider its place on the planet, this sculptor’s work feels more relevant than ever, whether viewed through dystopian or optimistic lenses.

“Hypercycle” will continue with a second chapter in New York focusing on Chadwick’s mature period from 1963 to 1979. The final chapter will be mounted in Asia. Complementing the exhibition series, a monograph set to be published in 2025 will provide a comprehensive overview of Chadwick’s career, offering diverse perspectives on his work and legacy.

The first chapter brings together sixty key works produced between 1947 and 1962, a time when the artist defined his unique approach and achieved international recognition. Photo: Tanguy Beurdeley. Courtesy of the Lynn Chadwick’s Estate and Perrotin.

“Hypercircle – Chapter 1: Scalene” is on view at Galerie Perrotin in Paris through November 16.

Elisa Carollo

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October 24, 2024
Tahnee Lonsdale Opens Up About Painting the Spiritual Feminine

Tahnee Lonsdale, Hears a Distant Trumpet, 2024; oil on canvas, 72 x 96 in (182.9 x 243.8 cm). Courtesy of the artist and Night Gallery. Photo Nick Massey

Tahnee Lonsdale was a name on everyone’s lips during and after last year’s Armory Show. Collectors fought for her work, and Cob Gallery’s booth sold out. A year later, the artist is set to open a solo exhibition at Night Gallery in Los Angeles on September 14. We caught up with Lonsdale, who is finalizing the details of the show, to discuss her work and its evolution over the past twelve months.

Lonsdale’s ethereal compositions are a tool she uses to explore the delicate interplays between consciousness, affection and sorrow. She told Observer that her process is mostly intuitive; the interactions of the colors on the canvas suggesting diaphanous allegorical and symbolical figures that manifest as she works. More recently, her process became even more intuitive as she embarked on a more loosely controlled practice—Lonsdale no longer traces or outlines her figures after spending time at Ceramica Suro in Guadalajara, Mexico. “I had never made anything with ceramics,” she said. “The process is very intuitive. I lost control of it at one point. It was meant to be like a vessel shaped like one of the smoothly curvilinear figures of my paintings, but it just kept growing outwards, with its own life.”

Tahnee Lonsdale in her studio. Photo Katrina Dickson.

Freed from the line, her mystical presences are made of color and light in a nebulous atmosphere, built up in the painting as Lonsdale would mold clay to make a vessel without any preconceived idea or outline. “I’m now building the painting from a central color,” she explained. “I start with a color field, and then I build the figures from the inside out rather than the outside.” Intuition is important, as is having faith in the process.

That process is like an excavation of archetypes hiding in our collective subconscious. Lonsdale’s intuitive paint application oscillates between opacity, transparency and fluorescence, creating auratic figures that emerge like mirages from an interplay between texture and depth, light and pigment. In this back-and-forth between abstraction and figuration—now much more present than before—those spiritual presences reappear.

But while Lonsdale’s process changed, the themes in her work have not. Inhabiting her paintings are her signature mystical and chimerical feminine spirits characterized by curvilinear shapes… the matriarchal presences that reconnect with all the mothers before us or with the Great Mother Earth. As the process has become looser, Longdsale feels an even more profound connection with them. “It’s more like an energetic color field,” she said. “Like some kind of heat coming out of it, then spreading with movements, and the figures will naturally start to emerge.” When she looks at the figures populating her paintings, many of them are traveling somewhere, fleeing or at least running in a defined direction. “They’re heading somewhere I cannot control.”

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There are no absolute autobiographical references in her work. Her subjects are universal images of womanhood and motherhood with all its implications: carer, guardian, warrior. During our conversation, Lonsdale admitted that her imagination was deeply influenced by the sculptural language of Henry Moore and his struggle to shape and describe humans at a historical turning point. The British modern master’s work was existential in its questioning, characterized by the postwar period; Lonsdale’s paintings capture the present-day need for reconnection with something profound, spiritual and timeless, both inside and outside us, after the pandemic.

Tahnee Lonsdale, Sandstorm, 2024; oil on canvas, 70 x 55 in (177.8 x 139.7 cm). Courtesy of the artist and Night Gallery

In that vein, Lonsdale’s work engages with an endless back-and-forth between rationalism, physicality and humanness. “I want them to start to be something,” she said. “I want to define that: I can see ahead; I can see a body. And I want to define it. However, every time I get that, it’s about really slowing down. I’m not going to define anything. I will keep this so slow and unintended and unintentional for as long as I can because if I try to define anything too soon, it feels contrived.”

Lonsdale found additional creative nourishment in her reconnection with Leonora Carrington, reading her writing and immersing herself in Carrigton’s rich symbolic imagination, diving deeper into Mexican culture and the mystical atmosphere in her period there. “They’re very fantastical and mystical, and there’s a feeling of transparency,” Lonsdale said. This idea of the veil returns and lives between the painting layers that she creates and the surface of prefiguration she wants to break. “She’s ancient, and you feel like she’s already half in the spirit world and half in the physical realm. Or maybe crossing over.”

Lonsdale’s intuitive paint application oscillates between opacity, transparency and fluorescence, creating diaphanous or auratic figures. Photo by Katrina Dickson

Lonsdale’s figures also cross between dimensions, time and space, tapping into timeless and profound archetypes: not just the mother archetype but the broader maternal archetype, which extends to ancestors, like grandmothers, great grandmothers and so on. As she dove further into the genesis of those images, we learned how they emerged in challenging moments as a form of resistance. “I was having a very hard time, and I remember sitting down with my sketchbook and being like, ‘I don’t want to plan what I will draw, and I’m just going to see what comes out,’” she said. “And I just started drawing these weird figures. They were very much about humanness back then. They didn’t feel celestial. They felt like a representation of emotions.” When she was overwhelmed—by heartbreak, by the pandemic—those figures helped her connect with something deeper inside of herself. When she made her first painting of them, they felt like the idea of protection and deeper spiritual meaning even as they embodied strong emotions. But, she emphasized, nothing about them is menacing, threatening or dangerous. They stand as symbolic reference points to offer this opportunity to reconnect with older traditions and the deeper spiritual meanings they’re embodying. “I have a solid connection to the figures in the paintings… they are very much present with me, and putting them on the canvas is just illuminating them.”

Tahnee Lonsdale, Like breath on glass, 2024; oil on canvas, 72 x 96 in (182.9 x 243.8 cm). Courtesy of the artist and Night Gallery. Photo Nick Massey

Collectively, Lonsdale’s ethereal figures are psychological or emotional shadows marching against the sun… against the light of self-reckoning and personal awareness. “They walk with you,” she said. “They’re just there constantly.” And there with them are the infinite possibilities and potential within women’s identities once they reconnect with a more primordial and wild but still creative feminine energy.

Tahnee Lonsdale’s “A Billion Tiny Moons” opens at Night Gallery in Los Angeles on September 14 and will be on view through October 19.

Elisa Carollo

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August 31, 2024
Philippe Parreno’s Largest Exhibition in Japan Is Worth the Trek

Designed by Japanese architects Nikken and nestled in the forest, Pola Museum of Art achieves a full symbiosis between Hakone’s natural beauty and art. Pola Museum of Art

The Pola Museum of Art might not yet be as well-known an art destination in Japan as the art islands Naoshima and Teshima but nevertheless, this private museum up in the mountains—just a two-hour train ride from Tokyo—offers the perfect combination of art and nature. All it takes to get there is the Romancecar limited express train up to Hakone-Yumoto Station. From there, you’ll transfer to a little old-style train that will take you on a 40-minute ride through rustically beautiful scenery, all the way up to the town of Hakone, where a shuttle (or the regular bus) can transport you to the museum. It’s a bit of a hike, but I can assure you it’s worth the trek.

Designed by Japanese architecture firm Nikken Sekkei, the Pola Museum of Art’s stunning glass and concrete architecture perfectly integrates with the surrounding landscape of Fuji-Hakone-Izu National Park. A large installation by Welsh artist and sculptor Cerith Wyn Evans occupies the extensive transitional space between exterior and interior, where bronze sculptures welcome you, including some by Henry Moore. Inside, the museum is a treasure chest of some of the most iconic masterpieces of Impressionist art.

The museum’s collection of approximately 10,000 items was assembled over some 40 years by the late Tsuneshi Suzuki, the second-generation head of the Pola Corporation, who established the museum and opened it to the public in 2002. The current show, “From Impressionism to Richter,” pairs the work of German contemporary artists with Monet’s Nyphees and Moules, as well as some of the finest works by Renoir, Cézanne and Picasso plus two enigmatic portraits by Amedeo Modigliani.

A view of the museum’s striking architecture in conversation with Cerith Wyn Evans’s neon sculpture. Photo by Elisa Carollo

In this unique setting, the museum is currently presenting the largest survey of Philippe Parreno’s work in Japan in the thought-provoking exhibition, “Places and Spaces,” making the trip even more of a must.

Since the ’90s, the acclaimed French artist has been challenging and investigating cinema as a medium of narration, blurring the lines between fiction and reality, artificial and natural, and unveiling its mechanisms and dynamics. His works, as well as his exhibitions, often consist of an ever-changing open field, which exposes the viewer to different technological simulations aimed at suspending the sense and perception of reality.

At Pola Museum of Art, Parreno has created a large-scale theatrical set divided into distinctive chapters or rooms, where mysterious presences, voices, lights, darkness and hidden messages come together in a dramatic sequence. Transforming the museum space into a labyrinth of symbols, the exhibition immerses the visitor in experiences of both wonder and confusion, not knowing what will be next or if one is already involved as a performer.

The journey starts in one of his aquarium rooms, where the sense of reality and materiality is subverted by a series of mylar floating fish that make you feel like you are inside water. Slowly drifting, these colorful fishes evoke a sense of familiarity, a hint of melancholy and nostalgia for a childhood left behind. Notably, in this latest work from Parreno’s fish balloon series, the artist meticulously crafted each of the fish eyes that convey irrepressible curiosity and joy, as they seem to be lost in contemplation in an imaginary ocean of the outdoor forest.

Philippe Parreno, My Room Is Another Fish Bowl. Photo by Elisa Carollo

In the next room, in his well-known installation Marilyn (2012), the actress’s deep loneliness resonates in her voice (here is generated by an algorithm) and in her writing (here recreated by a robot). Meanwhile, the camera pans silently around her hotel suite at New York’s opulent Waldorf Astoria Hotel, recording personal effects the diva left behind while trying to give her point of view. In this complex choreography and continuous interplay between fiction and reality, between artificial and automatic, the actress is continuously embodied and disembodied, resulting in what the artist has described as “a portrait of a ghost embodied in an image.” Questioning the power of the camera’s eye to shape our sense of reality while obscuring or emphasizing specific aspects in relation to what is shown or not shown, Parreno unveils the other side of the celebrity: there’s insecurity, fragility and deep discomfort lurking under the glamor and perfection shown on the screen.

The artifice behind this complex installation, and also the genius of the artist’s mind, is revealed downstairs in another room showcasing a series of rarely shown drawings created for three films: Marilyn, C.H.Z. and those currently in production (100 Questions, 50 Lies) along with a standalone drawing series, Lucioles.

Presented inside vitrines, these images dramatically appear and disappear with the interplay of light and darkness as some sudden epiphanies emerge from the subconscious. Parreno’s drawings are more like prophetic dreams. Made in preparation for the movies more than mental maps or storyboards, they appear as free annotations of symbols, situations and feelings. As precious witnesses to the inner workings of Parreno’s creative process, these seemingly random constellations of images envision sporadic moments then coming together in the flow of the cinematic life.

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The following room is occupied by orange and uncannily shaped balloons floating but also hanging as parasites. They’re part of Speech Bubbles, a series that Philippe Parreno conceived around the end of the ‘90s as a mass of cartoonish 3D speech bubbles of different colors, trapped against and suspended in their noise, without a way to convey their messages. The first batch of Speech Bubbles was produced in 1997 for a labor union demonstration—participants were meant to write messages on them. Today, with their playful but somehow disturbing and invasive presence, they stand as a critique of the transient culture of online chatting and of the futility of a public debate becoming increasingly empty of solid arguments and positions, but they can also represent the suppressed, silent protestations of countless voiceless individuals

Parreno’s Balloons are accompanied here by an article published in 1975 by Italian writer Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Disappearance of the Fireflies,” in which he mourned the vanishing of fireflies due to rapidly worsening environmental pollution, drawing parallels to the decline in postwar Italy’s culture and inner wealth as a result of insensible consumerism and authoritarianism. Inspired by this famous text and the powerful poetic metaphors made by the writer, in 1993, Parreno created an installation featuring electric lights that imitated fireflies: turned on only at night and so never encountered by visitors during museum hours, they powerfully evoked this idea of rebirth and loss, of renewal and the fragility of the flame of hope, to stay alive also in dark and discouraging geopolitical times.

Philippe Parreno, Speech Bubbles (Transparent Orange). Photo by Elisa Carollo

This experience of suspension between light and darkness, hope and despair, deception and simulation, continues in the next room, where a haunting robotic creature made of light bulbs stands, illuminating only intermittently. As an epiphanic presence emerging from the black void, it could be an angel from the hyper-technological age or a mermaid trapped in the relics of the electronic industry. A bench in the darkness invites you to sit in front of an LCD display that intricately replicates a future landscape imagined by generative A.I., the direction of light changing in alignment with the real-time position of the sun. On the other side, another luminous machine connected to numerous cables blinks in an organic yet irregular rhythm, as an alien creature that has been captured and imprisoned into a machine to study it.

All these tech-animated creatures in the room appear to have lives of their own, out of any functionality humans could have created them for. Still, everything in this sci-fi or post-human imaginative-yet-real space is carefully choreographed and manipulated by Parreno to deliver an uncannily nonsensical yet cohesive organic experience as if everything was in a code, in a language and rationale that goes beyond human comprehension.

Oscillating between chaos and order, between playful and unsettling and disorientating experiences, Parreno suspends any ordinary sense of reality, triggering a more conscious interrogation of what reality is once this is constantly integrated, shaped and manipulated by new everyday technologies, even beyond cinematic fiction.

In a moment when A.I. is supposed to “Ignite the Consciousness Revolution,” Philippe Parreno once again created an open field for a critical investigation of the complex interplay between technology, human experience, human cognition and the nature of reality itself. Repeatedly forcing the visitor into a series of experiences where boundaries between the virtual and physical world continuously blur, the artist proves to us how differentiating between “real” and “authentic” becomes more challenging if we don’t start to question what we perceive and what produced the data and input we absorbed.

Welcome to Reality Park echos eerily in the darkness of the last room, inviting us into an ambiguous unreality or possibly a portal to another reality. Parreno’s work appears as a “reality check,” unraveling the various potential levels of reality, many of which already seem to escape common understanding due to the intricate interplay between digital manipulation, A.I. and emerging technologies that have already infiltrated our daily lives.

As one exits Pola Museum of Art, out of this technological hyper-exposure, a nature trail leads one into the woods, where stunning works of contemporary art and sound art coexist with the very real landscape. In the forest’s silence, you can contemplate the gentle ripples in the water caused by the wind on Roni Horn’s cast glass Air Burial, listen to a music piece echoing softly across the trees and concentrate on your breath as you walk through the world and its beauty. Here, in this serene setting, perhaps, there’s still a chance to achieve a moment of higher consciousness out of our primordial human perception of the reality surrounding us.

Roni Horn, Air Burial (Hakone, Japan), 2017-2018; Cast glass. Photo: Koroda Takeru © Roni Horn

“Places and Spaces” is at Pola Museum of Art through December 1.

Elisa Carollo

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July 24, 2024