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拍品專文
'My sculptures are either mankind or man and they alternate or come in quite separate phases. My concern is not that mankind is any worse than it was; it is just that it is as bad as it was. The media gets news of the horrors to us more quickly than in the Dark Ages and we are living in another Dark Age of inhumanity. We are becoming brutalised; we no longer respond properly to atrocities' - Elisabeth Frink
Elisabeth Frink depicted the solitary male figure throughout her career, establishing it as one of the most recognisable and powerful themes of Modern British 20th Century sculpture. Such was her commitment to this motif that there is only one female image in her entire oeuvre, the Walking Madonna, commissioned for the Close at Salisbury Cathedral in 1981. Her devotion to the portrayal of the male figure has set her apart from her contemporaries, as well as her forebears, and has contributed significantly to the view that she was one of the most profound sculptors of the human condition this century has produced.
In the male figure she stated that both man and mankind were portrayed, a duality that was interchangeable in her work. For Frink, the female body and nude had too many traditional connotations of idealised beauty within the canon of Western art, a notion which she wished to move away from, instead presenting her figures as physical presences free from the symbolism of artistic, academic, or aesthetic, conventions. For her, the male figure provided the best vehicle to convey the energy and impetus needed to create a sensual sculptural form. The male figure became a symbol of humanity and she explored within its form the complexity of the human condition, addressing the strength, courage, beauty and sensuality of mankind, alongside its propensity for violence, brutality, and hatred. Portrayal of the emotive and characteristic traits of humankind became a driving force for Frink, striving to capture the feeling of a man over anatomical accuracy. She expressed this idea and focus in an interview with Bryan Robertson: `What I have tried to make clear in my sculpture ... is the way in which feeling, expression, even force and energy, should be below the surface ... The outer skin may define more or less conventional features, but with a second look should indicate the complex strains of nerve-endings and the anticipatory reflexes of something that is about to happen (E. Frink, interview, B. Robertson, Elisabeth Frink, Sculpture: Catalogue Raisonné, Salisbury, 1984, p. 33).
Conceived in 1970, and cast in an edition of three, the present work was created when the artist lived in the South of France with her second husband, Ted Pool, between 1967 and 1973.
Elisabeth Frink depicted the solitary male figure throughout her career, establishing it as one of the most recognisable and powerful themes of Modern British 20th Century sculpture. Such was her commitment to this motif that there is only one female image in her entire oeuvre, the Walking Madonna, commissioned for the Close at Salisbury Cathedral in 1981. Her devotion to the portrayal of the male figure has set her apart from her contemporaries, as well as her forebears, and has contributed significantly to the view that she was one of the most profound sculptors of the human condition this century has produced.
In the male figure she stated that both man and mankind were portrayed, a duality that was interchangeable in her work. For Frink, the female body and nude had too many traditional connotations of idealised beauty within the canon of Western art, a notion which she wished to move away from, instead presenting her figures as physical presences free from the symbolism of artistic, academic, or aesthetic, conventions. For her, the male figure provided the best vehicle to convey the energy and impetus needed to create a sensual sculptural form. The male figure became a symbol of humanity and she explored within its form the complexity of the human condition, addressing the strength, courage, beauty and sensuality of mankind, alongside its propensity for violence, brutality, and hatred. Portrayal of the emotive and characteristic traits of humankind became a driving force for Frink, striving to capture the feeling of a man over anatomical accuracy. She expressed this idea and focus in an interview with Bryan Robertson: `What I have tried to make clear in my sculpture ... is the way in which feeling, expression, even force and energy, should be below the surface ... The outer skin may define more or less conventional features, but with a second look should indicate the complex strains of nerve-endings and the anticipatory reflexes of something that is about to happen (E. Frink, interview, B. Robertson, Elisabeth Frink, Sculpture: Catalogue Raisonné, Salisbury, 1984, p. 33).
Conceived in 1970, and cast in an edition of three, the present work was created when the artist lived in the South of France with her second husband, Ted Pool, between 1967 and 1973.