![]() These anxieties link her to British contemporaries and to artists working across the Atlantic. Animals in anguish or in death throes correlate in her imagination with the war’s unmitigated physical toll on human bodies. Facing wartime food rations, she hunted small animals on the family’s property to fill the dinner table. In a 1960 BBC documentary, Elisabeth Frink in Chelsea, included in this exhibition, Frink explains how animals were the childhood inspiration for her art. At movie houses, she saw newsreels from the hellish European front. Her father fought in the Battle of Dunkirk. Her figures’ angst comes through unadulterated, as conspicuous as her horses’ formidable musculature, her warriors’ barrel chests, and her corvids’ menacing beaks.īorn a few years before the outbreak of World War II and raised Catholic in Thurlow, Suffolk, Frink grew up in a military family near an airbase. There are no glib asides, no social ironies, no otherworldly respites. Her sculpture is the visual equivalent of a Franz Kafka parable or a Samuel Beckett play. Her vision demonstrates the extent to which we bipeds, when stripped of cultural projections and psychological armor, become existentially nomadic. Their wounded, fractured and contorted bodies communicate dark truths about what it means to be alive.Įlisabeth Frink, “Bird” (1952), bronze (photo by Ken Adlard, © Frink Estate and Archive) She played a long game in the field where figurative realism opens itself up to 20th-century abstraction, as seen in the sculptures of Alberto Giacometti, Louise Bourgeoise, and Pablo Picasso - whose works are included here to hammer home the case that Frink is squarely in their league.įrink brings her sculptures - frequently of men, horses, birds, and metamorphic human-animal hybrids - to carnal, messy life. ![]() Diverse sculptors dominated this country’s postwar scene, as they have ever since, with pioneers like Henry Moore (1898–1986) and Barbara Hepworth (1903–1975) Frink’s older peers Lynn Chadwick (1914–2003) and Eduardo Paolozzi (1924–2005) and contemporary figures like Andy Goldsworthy, Rachel Whitehead and Anthony Gromley, to name only a few.īut few British sculptors stood at a remove from art world trends as consistently as did Frink. Elisabeth Frink (1930–1993) worked in sculpture, an art form that, prior to World War II, had little visibility in Britain.
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