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Lot Essay
We are very grateful to Sarah Chadwick for her assistance in preparing this catalogue entry.
By the 1970s, Chadwick's 'increasing tendency to interpret his work in terms of human relationship, rather than formal balance, begins to be audible. 'Presences' was how he refereed to his new figure sculptures; they were about being, not doing: I used to call them 'Watchers', but no longer. Sometimes they are not watching anything. What they are doing is illustrating a relationship - a physical relationship - between people'. It was through this relationship, not through purely formal or allusive qualities, that he wanted his sculptures to speak: 'If you can get their physical attitudes right you can spell out a message'.
What was the message? Chadwick figure sculptures of the early and mid-1970s consist largely of male and female couples - standing, sitting, walking or even lying together on a base striped to resemble a beach recliner. The male forms tend to be angular, the female ones modelled in the manner of the Elektras made from steel and Stolit but recalling the hand-formed surfaces of ancient terracottas from Tanagra. The mood is comparably tender and intimate, modulated by fine tunings of attitude - the tilt of torso, shoulders and heads. Trios of Watchers - or Presences - returned, small-scale and utterly without the brute frontality of their monumental avatars. A preoccupation with physical relationship had, in its way, defined a popular awareness of the Britishness of British sculpture in the mid-twentieth century' (M. Bird, Lynn Chadwick, Farnham, 2014, p. 147).
By the 1970s, Chadwick's 'increasing tendency to interpret his work in terms of human relationship, rather than formal balance, begins to be audible. 'Presences' was how he refereed to his new figure sculptures; they were about being, not doing: I used to call them 'Watchers', but no longer. Sometimes they are not watching anything. What they are doing is illustrating a relationship - a physical relationship - between people'. It was through this relationship, not through purely formal or allusive qualities, that he wanted his sculptures to speak: 'If you can get their physical attitudes right you can spell out a message'.
What was the message? Chadwick figure sculptures of the early and mid-1970s consist largely of male and female couples - standing, sitting, walking or even lying together on a base striped to resemble a beach recliner. The male forms tend to be angular, the female ones modelled in the manner of the Elektras made from steel and Stolit but recalling the hand-formed surfaces of ancient terracottas from Tanagra. The mood is comparably tender and intimate, modulated by fine tunings of attitude - the tilt of torso, shoulders and heads. Trios of Watchers - or Presences - returned, small-scale and utterly without the brute frontality of their monumental avatars. A preoccupation with physical relationship had, in its way, defined a popular awareness of the Britishness of British sculpture in the mid-twentieth century' (M. Bird, Lynn Chadwick, Farnham, 2014, p. 147).