Lynn Chadwick England, 1914-2003
Biography
'It seems to me that art must be the manifestation of some vital force coming from the dark, caught by the imagination and translated by the artist's ability and skill...Whatever the final shape the force behind it is indivisible. When we philosophise upon this force we lose sight of it. The intellect alone is still too clumsy to grasp it.' Lynn Chadwick
Lynn Chadwick remains the most exciting of all the artists to emerge in the post war period in Britain. Uninhibited by the constraints of a formal art education, Chadwick freely and instinctively invented images from his imagination, utilising his individual technique and creating a fantastic oeuvre of novel human and animal forms. His international recognition led to a dizzying programme of exhibitions and museum shows, private as well as public commissions.
The 1970’s and 80’s saw further advancements and metamorphoses into a faceted figuration, imposing beings with winged or robed bodies perched on slender tapered legs. He also channelled the essence of his own earlier mobiles in an art of motion, balance and stance in pursuit of a kind of body language that Chadwick himself described as ‘Attitude’. The 1990’s saw the reinterpretation of beasts and couples with the ineffable attitude of Chadwick’s earlier inventions in the reflective panels of sheet stainless steel, including a final reworking of the mobile form, on a monumental scale.
