On View: Lynn Chadwick: Maquette VII Walking Couple (1976): August 2023

The August edition of Baldwin Contemporary's 'On View' focuses on post-war modernist Lynn Chadwick's 'Maquette VII Walking Couple' (1976).

Associated with the 'Geometry of Fear', a term used to describe the art movement that emerged in Britain during the 1950s in response to the anxieties and uncertainties of the post-war era, 'Maquette VII' (1976) presents the intriguing interplay between positive and negative space that Chadwick's figures became so well versed in. Typical of Chadwick's works from this period the woman and man are similar but not completely alike, employing a visual code whereby the male figure has a rectangular head with the female having a triangular one.

Strong, energetic and still exceptionally contemporary, one of the most enduring features of the work is in its ability to communicate both intimacy and alienation in equal measure.

Lynn Chadwick was an English artist known for his innovative bronze and steel sculptures of abstracted and expressive figures and animals. Chadwick's method is considered unique in his choice not to sketch his sculpture beforehand, preferring instead to improvise and weld metal without a specific plan in place.

He was born on November 24, 1914 in Barnes (London) and studied as an apprentice architect under Roger Thomas, who would encourage him towards sculpture. Chadwick's earliest sculptures were fragile mobiles constructed with balsa wood, copper, and brass, not unlike those of Aexander Calder.

Chadwick was part of a generation of British sculptors who surprised audiences at the 1952 Venice Biennale by breaking with the tradition of carving sculpture from wood or stone. Instead, he welded iron and bronze rods into expressionistic, figurative works inspired by the human form and animals that nonetheless hovered close to abstraction. He rejected what he saw as the amorphousness of stone, preferring to work with iron because it allowed him to "do a three dimensional drawing…which has a very definite shape." In that sense, his work shared something with architecture (the field he originally pursued in his early career).