Barry Flanagan

This exhibition of work by Barry Flanagan (b. Prestatyn, North Wales, 1941) is the first in a series of modest ‘mini-retrospectives’ the SMAK is organising in order to take an in-depth look at substantial groups of work in its collection. The intention is to show the work of the artists concerned anew, surrounded and put in context by a range of works from museums and private collections in Belgium and abroad.

One element that unites almost all Flanagan’s works is his sense of his responsibility, as an artist, towards the material with which he works. This had ripened to the full by the time of his second solo exhibition in 1968, where he showed a number of ‘sculptures’ in the simplest of soft materials such as jute sacks, rope and cloth, giving them such simple titles as Heap, Bundle and Pile. In addition to the simple and playful aspect of the wordplay itself, these titles were the purest, most accurate and therefore also ‘most responsible’ illustration of the materials with which the sculptures were constructed. This inspiration provided the starting point for a whole series of works made of soft materials which were to appear over the following years, from which Flanagan tried increasingly to distil the inherent qualities.

Several years later, in the early Seventies, Flanagan made a sudden ‘media switch’ from soft materials to stone. On a visit to the marble quarries of northern Italy, Flanagan turned out to be an enthusiastic hunter of fossil stones, in which he recognised the same inherent visual qualities as in his soft organic materials. According to Flanagan, the poetry of these fossil stones lay after all in the fact that it was already there, and only had to be brought out by a gentle hand and entirely in conformance with its specific nature. It is in this spirit that he set to work on his early Stone Carvings. These works are typified by their intimate, personal and concentrated expression, which is made explicit only by a subtle added suggestion by the sculptor, which sometimes consisted of no more than a simple but deliberately positioned scratch. Flanagan’s aim here was no more than to provide the viewer with a number of keys to a possible interpretation, without forcing the object to ‘behave’ other than it would in reality. In his later Stone Carvings – which are simply given the title Carving plus a sequential number – Flanagan suddenly departed from his gentle handling of the material. He started making much more radical changes to the found stones, though without losing sight of them as objects in their own right from which the sculpture must emerge. For this ‘more in-depth’ treatment of the stone, he drew inspiration from the characteristic Italian technique for marble, whereby one first chisels a small model in stone before venturing onto the proper work. Flanagan adopted this procedure but without concerning himself with its necessary ‘slowness’. He therefore restricted himself to a model in clay, since this can be manipulated more directly, which makes the appearance of the final stone product more sensual and individual.

Oddly enough, Flanagan’s use of clay models led indirectly to his monumental works in steel sheeting, which first made their appearance in the late nineteen-seventies. While making several simple clay bowls, he became fascinated by the concave and convex sides of these small objects, which he associated with the yin and yang poles of oriental philosophy and with the associated sexual import. From this time onwards he introduced two aspects into his work that were to dominate it in the years to come: the male and female sexes and the tension between the second and third dimensions.

Sheet steel is after all perfect for the sort of ‘origami’ Flanagan had in mind, in which, by simply folding the material, he removed the boundary between the second and third dimensions. His monumental Sculpture for the City of Ghent (1980), recently returned to a location in the city after an absence of thirteen years, is typical of this. Geometric forms were cut out of a huge steel sheet, and by folding them out into the third dimension, they at the same time keep the sculpture in balance.

At the end of the seventies Flanagan once again turned to cast bronze, a technique he had neglected for more than ten years. He continued his exploration of this technique, and used it for figurative animal motifs, which had always been part of his sketchbooks and his early Stone Carvings. It was in this period that by chance he stumbled upon a book, The Leaping Hare, by George Ewart Evans and David Thomson, which described both the biological and mythological connotations of the hare in the course of history. Flanagan was struck above all by the historical cultural associations between this creature and life itself. In the hieroglyphics of the ancient Egyptians the hare was symbolic of ‘existence’, while for the Chinese it meant immortality. Such contemporary Western artists as Joseph Beuys were also intrigued by the metaphorical link between the hare and life. However, Flanagan’s affinity with the hare was based not only on its historical cultural links with life itself, but also – and this is of equal importance – on its typically fitful and intuitive motor system and character. It is with this interpretation of the hare that Flanagan’s work shows the most genuine link, not only his bronze sculptures of this animal, but in fact his entire artistic production.

They are after all the depiction in bronze of both a visualisation, in cultural history and metaphorical terms, of life itself, and the capricious and intuitive nature of their maker. In the ‘classical’ tradition of the one medium to which he remained faithful in more than forty years as an artist: sculpture.

The Barry Flanagan exhibition is accompanied by a short publication including pieces by Philippe Van Cauteren and Thibaut Verhoeven.

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Barry Flanagan