SOTHEBY'S SELLING EXHIBITION OF MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY SCULPTURE

Saturday, 23 September 2006 12:37

Derbyshire, UK - On 8 September Sotheby’s major exhibition of Modern and Contemporary sculpture will open at Chatsworth in Derbyshire.  Entitled Beyond Limits, the exhibition which lasts for seven weeks, will feature monumental works by 25 international artists, from Henry Moore and Damien Hirst to Dale Chihuly and Jean Dubuffet.  All the works exhibited will be available for private sale.

Being unveiled at Chatsworth and seen for the first time in public is a newly-completed work by Britain’s foremost contemporary artist Damien Hirst.  Saint Bartholomew, Exquisite Pain, a bronze figure standing two and a half metres tall was completed in August of this year, especially for Beyond Limits.

Francis Outred, Sotheby’s Contemporary Art specialist for the exhibition, said: “It is an incredible privilege to be able to present this breathtaking new sculpture by Damien Hirst for the first time.  Its beautiful classical lines suit the stunning natural landscape of Chatsworth perfectly and draw the viewer in.  Like the exhibition this piece adopts an incredible heritage and gives it a contemporary twist and is to my mind one of Hirst’s best sculptures.” 

Hirst’s inspiration for the piece “comes from memories I have of woodcuts and etchings I remember seeing when I was younger.  As Saint Bartholomew was a martyr who was skinned alive, he was often used by artists and doctors to show the anatomy of the human body and this is also what I've done.  He holds his own skin over his arm and he holds a scalpel and a pair of scissors in his hands so that his exposure and pain are seemingly self-inflicted.  It's beautiful yet tragic, and like Saint Sebastian his face shows no pain.  I added the scissors because I thought Edward Scissorhands was in a similarly tragic yet difficult position - it has a feel of a rape of the innocents about it."

 The exhibition will include work by leading British artists from both the contemporary and modern eras.  Leading the field of the modern artists is a monumental work by Henry Moore, Reclining Figure from 1982 which was bought directly from the artist shortly after its creation.

Alexander Platon, Sotheby’s Impressionist & Modern Art Specialist for the exhibition, said: “We are delighted to be offering such a monumental work by one of Britain’s most celebrated sculptors.  Exhibited in the historic gardens of Chatsworth, in the heart of the Peak District, this sculpture highlights the elemental nature of Moore’s art and provides a perfect illustration of his theory that ‘Sculpture is an art of the open air’.”

The subject of the reclining figure explored in this iconic work was initially inspired by the example of Mexican sculpture in Moore’s earlier carvings, and was one of his chief preoccupations throughout his long career.  In fact, more than half the sculptures Moore executed in his lifetime were reclining nudes. 

Anish Kapoor’s extremely rare Sky Mirror from 1999 will also feature in the exhibition.  Perhaps one of the ultimate sculptural interpretations of the artistic concept of the ‘void’, unlike the vertigo inducing, immaterial voids of his infinite ‘holes in space’, this large, reflective disk of polished steel sucks in and reflect its surroundings, presenting a world which is inverted and endless.  Coincidentally, Kapoor has just completed a vast 35 feet version of this piece which will be unveiled by the Public Art Fund at Rockefeller Plaza in New York in September.  There are only a handful of these pieces in the world and each one is of a different size.  The sculpture interacts with the environment in which it is placed and as it disappears and reappears within the grounds of Chatsworth, this will provide one its most dramatic backdrops.

Janice Blackburn, Guest Curator said: “Beyond Limits provided a unique and glorious opportunity to display a broad spectrum of iconic 20^th century sculpture in the historic yet timeless grounds of Chatsworth.  The challenge was to create surprising yet harmonious juxtapositions between the carefully selected works of art enabling them to be viewed afresh and from new perspectives in this spectacular setting.”

Made especially for the exhibition is Dale Chihuly’s extraordinary boat sculpture which has transformed the canal pond at Chatsworth, establishing a direct and immediate interaction between art and nature (illustrated left).  The monumental, sculptural form, is illuminated by its intense, vibrant color and subtle linear decoration.  Within a 30-foot canoe, Chihuly has placed his magical multi-colored glass objects.

Also created especially for the exhibition is Antony Gormley’s Domain LIII, the figure of a man created from a mass of stainless steel bars which sits on the roof of the north wing of Chatsworth House.  Apparently surveying the grounds of the exhibition, the figure is perched precariously on the edge and sways in the wind.  The sensation of a figure whose silhouette is subtly carved out in the sky adds a new dimension to the exhibition.

It is entirely fitting that the exhibition will feature Gormley’s Angel of the North given its iconic nature in the north of England.  The piece is a 1:20 scale maquette of the Gateshead Angel of the North, which is Britain's largest sculpture, standing at 20 meters tall as it overlooks the Gateshead valley. Conceived in 1995, in the present work, like the larger work, the encompassing wings are angled slightly forward to create a sense of embrace.

Jean Dubuffet’s Arbre Biplan from 1968 stands at more than five meters high and is one of eleven monumental sculptures made by the artist during his lifetime, six of which are now in museums and two in public spaces.  This piece is one of the three remaining in private hands and was itself originally in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Further modern works in the exhibition include Raymond Duchamp-Villon’s Le Cheval Majeur, dated 1914.  This series of sculptures, after the abstracted form of a horse in motion, is undoubtedly his most important achievement as an artist and a landmark of cubist sculpture.  The subject evolved over several months, between the spring and autumn of 1914, from a rapidly-worked composition entitled Horse and Rider, through a series of studies of the horse alone, each successive study becoming more and more dynamic and finely-articulated.  The present work shows the artist's sculpture in its most mature and finished state, the horse becoming a bold and finely-tuned machine.  Works from the same series are in the Pompidou and Tate collections.

Newton de Gala is a monumental bronze by Salvador Dalí which relates to an important painting that the artist completed in 1932 entitled Phosfene de Laporte, in which the figure of Newton appears in the lower half of the canvas.  The ideas for many of Dalí’s sculptures derived from his paintings, and this work clearly demonstrates the powerful effect of translating the original two-dimensional image into three dimensional form.  This edition was created under the direction of the artist for the sculptural ensemble entitled Dolmen de Dalí in the Plaza Salvador Dalí in Madrid, and demonstrates the artist's continued fascination with this figure nearly 50 years after he first conceived it in oil.

The Large Leaping Hare by Barry Flanagan, standing beside the canal pond at Chatsworth, was executed in 1982.  It is from an edition of four and was one of the first leaping hares Flanagan ever made in this monumental scale.  Soaring through the air at above head height, there is a feeling of freedom and movement that surrounds the gravity-defying, outstretched limbs of the jumping hare.

Further artists whose works are included in the exhibition are: Ron Arad, Scott Burton, George Condo, Mark di Suvero, Eric Goulder, Duane Hanson, Robert Indiana, Keith Haring, Jacques Lipchitz, Fernando Botero, Aristide Maillol, Giacomo Manzu, Joan Miró, James Turrell, Niki de Saint Phalle and Jaume Plensa.

Biographical Information

Janice Blackburn, Curator of Beyond Limits
Writer and Curator of Contemporary Art, Sotheby's London

Janice Blackburn is a freelance writer and curator of contemporary art.  Between 1985-94 she worked as assistant curator at the Saatchi Collection, London.  In 1997 she became the founder curator of Sotheby’s Contemporary Art Exhibitions, London and New York.  In 1998 she realized the ‘In Focus’ series of exhibitions at Sotheby’s and in the same year curated Spirit Of the Times at Bowes Museum, County Durham.  In 2005 she curated two exhibitions for the Crafts Council Shop at the V&A: Dressing for Dinner andTeaTotal.

Alexander Platon, Sotheby’s specialist in charge of Beyond Limits
Deputy Director, Impressionist and Modern Art Department, Sotheby's London.

Alexander Platon received his MA in Connoisseurship and the Art Market from Christie's Education, New York in 1999.  He then joined Sotheby's, New York where he worked for a year in the Impressionist & Modern Art department.  In 2000 he moved to Sotheby's London and he is currently in charge of the Impressionist & Modern Art Day sales.  His latest auctions in February and June 2006 were the most successful sales of their kind to be held at Sotheby's in London.

• Chatsworth is a three-hour drive from London.  For full details , go to http://www.chatsworth.org