Notes

Thanks to the Artist's Estate for their assistance with cataloguing information.

Lynn Chadwick’s abstracted standing or sitting human forms in bronze or welded steel, with bulky draped bodies and sticklike limbs, are immediately recognisable. The artist works with the tensions set up by contrasts between dark and light, rough and smooth, solid and insubstantial, organic and geometric and matt and polished, and he succeeds equally well at all scales from table-top-sized works to monumental, larger-than-life figures that dominate the landscape. He builds a space frame that is filled in with plaster compound and then cast, so his sculptures invariably appear constructed rather than carved or modelled and his focus on geometric space-displacing forms possibly reflects his original training and experience as an architectural draftsman. In the present lots, the rectangular (male) and triangular (female) headed forms, with featureless bronze faces burnished to a mirror-like sheen, are swathed in voluminous, almost architectural drapery.

In Cloaked Couple VII, it billows out behind as if blown by a strong wind, even though the figures themselves appear to walk on sedately. Chadwick’s large-scale sculptures can be seen in the grounds at Lypiatt Park (Gloucestershire, UK), the Tudor manor house the artist bought in 1958 and slowly renovated and restored until his death in 2003. The estate is now managed by the artist’s family.