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This exhibition
focuses on sculpture produced in Britain during the
20th century. Why sculpture? Because more than any
other artform of the period, sculpture in Britain
took extraordinary leaps and bounds into new
territories. Almost every artist represented here
shook off the achievements of his or her
predecessors in an effort to find new ways of making
objects that would be true to his or her own time
and temperament. There is no resting on laurels.
There is a sustained search, from the beginning of
the century to its end, to find the language, the
materials, the form, the volume, the sensations and
the colour in which to express the way each
generation feels about itself and the society from
which it springs.
The exhibition opens with the work of Henry Moore.
This son of a coal miner, brought up among the small
towns of Britain’s industrial north, was amongst the
first of these artists to discover the power and
beauty of non-western art, non-Christian art. The
monumental sculptures of Mayan and Aztec
civilisation, which he studied as a young man in the
galleries of the British Museum, opened his eyes to
the potential of a new type of expressive form:
bold, simplified, abstracted and elemental, with
rounded shapes that suggested and echoed the
landscapes from which they have been carved or hewn.
The sculptures shown in the gardens of the Tehran
Museum of Contemporary Art take the human presence
and invest it with the rhythm and timelessness of
landscape, a distant reflection of the downlands and
rolling hills of their native England. In other
works by Moore, the smooth and pared down elements
that make up individual sculptures are reminiscent
of ancient formations, both natural and man-made.
Profoundly conscious of what great civilisations
have left behind in terms of both monuments and
ideals, Moore seems to be setting himself the task
of linking modern and ancient worlds, calling up
some primordial yet instinctive feelings that exist
within us all. |
:Some works
Henry Moore
Barbara Hepworth
Anthony Caro
Richard Long
Anya Gallacio
Damien Hirst
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