Cambridge, UK - Picasso, Matisse, Brancusi and Modigliani are just a few of the artists to be seen in ‘WE the moderns’ – Gaudier-Brzeska and the birth of modern sculpture.  The exhibition launches Kettle’s Yard’s 50th birthday celebrations. On exhibition 20 January - 18 March 2007.

Henri Gaudier-Brzeska’s career as a sculptor was brief – from 1911, when he came to London from France, until he was killed in action in 1915, aged just 23.  Yet, despite his young age and a life marked by poverty, in three and a half years Gaudier created a substantial and truly advanced body of work.  This exhibition, for the first time, sets his achievement against the European context in which his art matured, and traces his contribution to the sculpture of the modern age.

Initially inspired by the sculpture of Auguste Rodin and Post-Impressionist painting, Gaudier soon became aware of the latest artistic developments on the continent, above all Cubism, Futurism and Expressionism.   This was a time when artists were awakening to the arts of non- European cultures, when Einstein was developing his theory of relativity, Freud was exposing the importance of the unconscious and Henri Bergson was lecturing to packed theatres across the continent on our experience of space and time.

Gaudier’s work was nurtured by these ideas, exploring for example the representation of movement in the essentially static medium of sculpture, new ways of constructing sculptural forms through geometrical planes, and the method of carving directly in stone.  These were concerns shared by the artists he cited as fellow ‘moderns’ – Constantin Brancusi, Amedeo Modigliani, Jacob Epstein and Alexander Archipenko – and also by others, such as Joseph Csàky, Raymond Duchamp-Villon, Henri Laurens, Jacques Lipchitz, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso and Ossip Zadkine, as well as the German Expressionists and the Italian Futurists.  At the same time his graphic work was strongly influenced by Toulouse-Lautrec.

By displaying a substantial selection of Gaudier’s sculptures and drawings alongside work by all these artists, the exhibition offers fresh insight into the sculptor’s art, highlighting not only the influences that shaped it but also striking affinities with contemporary and later work, which reveal Gaudier’s modernity. 

Drawing on the Kettle’s Yard collection, the most important of Gaudier-Brzeska’s work anywhere, the exhibition features major loans from British and European galleries, including Tate, the British Museum, the V&A, the Centre Georges Pompidou, the Musée Rodin and Kunsthaus Zurich.  It is curated by Sebastiano Barassi and Michael Harrison at Kettle’s Yard, and will travel to the Graves Art Gallery in Sheffield (31 March to 16 June 2007).

A well-illustrated exhibition catalogue, with essays by Mark Antliff (Duke University), Jonathan Blackwood (Kingston University), Jon Wood (Henry Moore Institute) and Sebastiano Barassi will be available.

For further information please contact Kettle’s Yard, Castle Street, Cambridge, U.K. Visit : www.kettlesyard.co.uk