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BRIAN WILLSHER
Photograph by Steven Gray AVA N T G A R D E
B R O N Z E S 3
“Here’s pure sculpture, indeed! More than that: memorable, breathtaking sculpture!” Sir Henry Moore
“A master of enigmas, his art propounds beliefs in beauty without precedent.” Sir Herbert Reed
“Brian Willsher is the most exciting rising star in British Sculpture. He is incontestably the most important and original artist working in Britain today. I have no doubt he will eventually be ranked with such greats as Giacometti, Brancusi and Arp.” Richard Brodrick, Art Historian
“With an unbroken cascade of works that create new audacious adventures into form,
time and space, Brian Willsher is the one name that stands out in the development of British post-war sculpture.”
Dennis Bowen, International Association of Art Critics “Only Gaudi, Pevsner and Gabo offer faint historical parallels to Willsher’s ability to dismantle a piece of wood, releasing it from its static state, then kinetize and recrystallize it
into a new revolutionary form. It is this ability to penetrate into the new that constitutes genius.”
Janies Crabtree, FR.I.B.A. “Aesthetically, there is a power and magicality in Willsher’s work that conveys a charge not unlike a detonation. His art mixes astonishing unpredictability with inevitability, and that, I think, is the definition of what authentic art must be.”
Stella Santa Caterina, International Association of Art Critics, Italy. “At a time when the very barest hint of originality can guarantee an artist or sculptor fame and fortune, Brian Willsher is producing sculpture that stamps him as one of the few geniuses of his generation.”
Irving Grose, LL.B. Director, Belgrave Gallery, London.
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CONTENTS INTRODUCTION by Roberto Gagliardi 7 ADVANCING THE FRONTIERS OF NEW SCULPTURE by Bill Hopkins 9 THE AESTHETICS OF THE NEW by Mel Gooding 11 MONUMENTS IN MICROCOSM by Robin Dutt 15 THE BRONZES 17 BIOGRAPHY 78 BIBLIOGRAPHY 79
CATALOGUES 79
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INTRODUCTION
This exhibition realises a long-standing determination to bring the genius of Brian Willsher to a larger audience. Another source of satisfaction is that it brings together the largest representation of his bronze sculptures, so far assembled, procured from private and public collections, and therefore can be termed definitive. It is the first time these extraordinary bronze images have been grouped together outside his studio, and therefore it also represents a milestone to his wider recognition. One cannot help a certain modest pride in the fact. It was some five years ago now that I was first introduced to these ultra-modernist abstractions by my friend the art critic Bill Hopkins. In describing unequivocally Willsher’s work as “the most revolutionary creative vision in modern sculpture�, he challenged me to offer my judgement. The unforgettable impact on me of the first works has resulted in this exhibition, and the decision to provide a permanent window for his work in my gallery, with regular exhibitions of further works in bronze.
Roberto Gagliardi National Union of Journalists
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ADVANCING THE FRONTIERS OF NEW SCULPTURE
Art history has always been a perverse chronicle. Yesterday's iconoclasts become today's gods, as yesterday's hailed heroes metamorphose into censorious bores. Brian Willsher is a happier example of its capriciousness. The ultra-modernist recent work he is now showing has assumed that indefinable mantle of gravitas that speaks of being firmly on its way to museum status, despite its unrelenting inscrutability. Yet, just a little over twenty years ago, his first wood sculptures, mixing geometric abstraction with organic abstraction, caused a national scandal, threatened personal bankruptcy, and brought the British art world to the barricades. The furore was such that it forced him to vanish to regain his privacy, the essential condition for continuing his work. But he left behind a name firmly entrenched in art history as the renegade who changed the definition of sculpture in this country decisively.
BILL HOPKINS
Eminent art critic & Polemicist
It is a strange story that stands re-telling in that it parallels an earlier scandal in 1926 involving Constantin Brancusi's polished bronze 'Bird in Space' which, when despatched to a Guggenheim Exhibition, was refused free entry into America by the Federal Customs and Excise Department on the grounds that it was 'just a piece of metal', not a sculpture at all. Poor Brancusi went mad trying to prove it was otherwise, only succeeding after a lengthy court trial tediously adumbrating aesthetics. In Willsher's case, our own bureaucrats, armed with the Inland Revenue, went further. In June 1968, he was informed brusquely of a departmental decision to deny his work the status of fine art and was therefore immediately subject to the customary 40% manufacturing tax on 'household decorations'. Effectively, with estimated backpayments totalled up, he was bankrupted. The effrontery of the decision, delivered on a man who had exhibited sculpture in five successive Royal Academy of Art Summer Shows, beside a number of successful one-man shows in West End galleries, ignited widespread outrage and protests. At the forefront of his supporters were Sir Henry Moore and Sir Herbert Read, who both revealed themselves as admirers of his "absolutely electrifying sculpture", and signified a joint readiness to testify as such. Newspapers such as The Observer and The Guardian turned the scandal into a national campaign against perennial Government Philistinism, the latter publishing a caustic editorial opinion leader entitled: "When is a sculpture not a sculpture?". Inevitably, after subjecting the sculptor to all the tortures of distraint, the civil servants grudgingly retreated, having disrupted another life. Willsher’s subsequent flight was from officialdom, sympathisers and press alike. It
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led him to shunning the publicity of galleries for years, selling his work surreptitiously off market stalls or through provincial arts and craft shops. It was obviously a bad case of people-poison, but put a lot of bargain art into unexpected places. Happily, he kept his best work back. But the implications of that scandal still remain disquieting to the reflective. The Guardian’s rhetorical question: ‘When is a sculpture not a sculpture?’ was answerable only by ‘When created by a man without the proper qualifications and status of a duly accepted sculptor’. So much for the possibility of inspired genius! It follows that the impersonal attempted degradation of Willsher was symptomatic of an ossifying method of selection in terms of talent that brutalised the best. In Willsher’s case, he only escaped through the extraordinary rapidity of his recognition by just such men as Sir Henry Moore and Sir Herbert Read, and that was his saving. The other truth, of course, was that Willsher had made himself a target by being an unabashed outsider. Without any formal art education, he had come to sculpture drawn by a natural affinity after variously trying his hand at being a trainee telephone engineer, a farm worker and a dental technician. With no urge to figurative work but a joyous response to the possibilities of line, form, mass and spatiality, I have his word that he was completely oblivious to the fact that he was thinking and creating forms that contradicted everything being done in sculpture around him, and indeed everything that had gone before. When he began inventing an entirely original geometric vocabulary in threedimensional image-making, and exhibiting the sculptures in any gallery that pressed to show it, he similarly failed to appreciate the shock of the new on others. The impact of those first avant garde constructions aroused not just the attention of the art world, but eventually the bureaucrats with the consequences I have recorded. One can understand how revolutionary sculpture can easily be seen as incomprehensible, particularly to prosaic minds. It is not as easily classifiable as perhaps architecture or women’s fashions. But its accessibility to a widening audience is coming closer, and with it the acknowledgement of Willsher’s genius. I have no doubt whatever that by the end of this century he will be seen as the most original and powerful sculptor this country has produced. Already, on the strength of several masterpieces, notably The Second Coming, Venus, Invading Purple, How Can I Explain? (portrait of Theo and Vincent van Gogh) and The Storm, he stands alongside Arp, Brancusi and Giacometti as a major innovator of contemporary sculpture. I predict it will not be long before other countries beside our own will think so.
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THE AESTHETICS OF THE NEW “Every Force Evolves a Form” - Celtic saying
It will be evident to anyone encountering these extraordinary works that Brian Willsher is possessed of a sculptural imagination of extreme distinction and purity. Each work has the quality of absolute inevitability; it could take no other shape or form. It has demanded its structure, as a form in nature conforms to necessity, and can be no other. Like natural forms, each of these pieces is unprecedented, wonderfully unique; and each can be seen to possess a generic resemblance to all the others, being brought into existence by the same force, shaped by the same informing creative energy. This analogy will serve my critical purposes further. For the forms evolved by nature are subject to contradictory dynamics: towards complication and complexity in one direction, towards reduction and simplicity in the other. All Willsher’s sculpture is characterised by a tensile equilibrium, a perfect resolution into form of just such a dialectic.
MEL GOODING
Distiguished author, lecturer & Art critic
Sometimes the predominant tendency is toward an involved and elaborated interlocking of parts; at others (and increasingly so in the latest work) it is toward a unified single movement, simple and curving like a wave or a helix. The sculptural stillness of these works is that of a perfect balance, like the stasis of a pair of evenly weighted scales, or the poise of a wave at the moment before it breaks, or the tension of an attuned spring before it recoils. It is a stillness that implies movement. In certain works, like Heroic Head, the spectral Millenia and his Salute to Henry Moore, there are convolutions and jointings and helmeted enclosures that resemble the articulation of limbs, hips and shoulders, and the protective structures of the vertebrae and skull. These are essentially combinatory forms whose sculptural vitality has to do with oppositions: shadow and light, interior and exterior, enclosed space and solid form. These pieces enact the drama of those oppositions with a psychic intensity; they are charged with the actualities of bodily, mental and unconscious experience; we respond by identifying. For Willsher’s abstraction is never merely formal, a matter of the disposition
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of shapes and spaces in pleasing arrangements. Each sculpture is the inevitable outcome of an unavoidable process , forced into objecthood by pressures that cannot be denied, like that brass of Rimbaud that, through no fault of its own, wakes up to find itself a bugle. It embodies things felt and seen, without and within. Many of the recent sculptures are more open in form than those just described. These works characteristically rise either in a single sweeping wave (Storm, Prince of War, Geometry of Response) or in a succession of alternating spiralling curves (Sun Dancers, Construction Eight, Doppleganger, Helios), structured in organised, rhythmic repetitions from a single base like a totem, a standing stone, or a Roman bust. That surprising conjunction of comparative possibilities suggests something important about Willsher’s sculpture to which I shall return: its capacity to evoke memories of other sculpture whilst remaining completely original and unmistakably itself. As with all of Willsher’s sculpture these pieces are absolutely three dimensional, and the dynamic of their forms suggests a central axial energy ineluctably pushing them outwards into a figure that is actually or implicitly helical. The individual curvatures that are combined in these works, recesses or extensions depending on your point of view at any given moment, are themselves composed of concentric forms, usually diminishing as they explode outwards from the axis. As the sculptures’ spiral configurations imitate a natural form discovered in many manifestations - shell, whirlpool, nebula - so does this characteristic form derive from nature growth rings in trees, the successive waves from a disturbance in water, the strata of the earth’s crust - and both express a dynamic process, the transmission of energy. To describe the essentially organic structure of these pieces, and to see in the principles of their construction an analogy with the dynamics of nature, is a way of indicating their place in the line of modern sculptural invention. Willsher’s work is absolutely abstract, and can be seen in relation to that Constructivist effort to find forms that modern science revealed, and yet connect back to the subjective consciousness of the experiencing individual. “There is nothing in nature that is not within us” wrote Naum Gabo.
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“Whatever exists in nature, exists in us in the form of our awareness of its existence. All creative activities of Mankind consist of the search for an expression of that awareness”. Willsher’s procedures are compulsive and intuitive; he belongs to no movement, and he does not work to any programme, but his practice conforms perfectly to Gabo’s definition of the artist’s task, which is to “(bring) forth an image which is in a language of its own, acceptable to all men, and imparting his message without the help of anything other than his own pictorial and plastic means.” That is a grand formulation, but it well serves my purpose. For as Willsher’s images are uniquely his own inventions, original and individual, particular and strange, they are at the same time universal and archetypal, immediately recognisable, having these correspondences with the natural order that we have remarked, and which gives them their distinctive and potent aesthetic. Unconcerned with artistic convention, oblivious to trends and uncaring fashion, working in the creative solitude of a kind of obsession, like Rimbaud’s poetic visionary, Willsher looks within: “If that which he brings back from down there has form, he gives form; if it is formless he gives formlessness.” In his case what he finds and realises are the symmetries and repetitions of nature, the hidden geometries of the organic. In constructing or carving his sculptures out of those abstract components he arrives at unified and coherent images of a rare clarity and grace, their formal unity emphatically completed by casting and patination. These images are at once surprising and familiar; they may suggest the human torso, the classical bust, the wing of a bird, the sweep of a wave, hands curved in prayer, helmets, heads, masks, flowers, bones; they contain hollows and spaces that bring to mind the secret hiding places of childhood; they rise from their bases like totems, crucifixes, idols. Reduced to the size of a hand they might be charms or talismans; magnified they might be monuments. Recollecting the great sculptures of the past, primitive, archaic, classical, renaissance, they arrive at an unmistakable and uncompromising modernity.
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MONUMENTS IN MICROCOSM
The single most significant quality of Brian Willsher’s sculpture is its confidence. The immediately appealing pieces (though by nature of his rigorous style, very similar) have definite characters and identities. You find yourself drawn to one and not so much to another despite the fact that both will be made up of the same arches and curves. It is the subtle difference that makes the maximum impact. Willsher’s work asserts itself. It is strong, solid. The individual works are monuments in microcosm. The sculptures have a stately air and some are plainly totemic or ironic, immediately suggesting perhaps, the spiritual preoccupations of an ancient people.
ROBIN DUTT Art critic & Curator
The supreme confidence of the curled forms, almost its arrogance in creating solid waves in the air is evident, especially if one is seeing several of the pieces together. Rather like human beings - each is different but the core is the same. They understand each other. I well remember the first time I saw Willsher’s work. Bill Hopkins rang and said he’d like me to come around to his apartment in Kensington Park Road and see some work, which was really exciting. The number of times any art critic is told this and who complies with the request only to be disappointed need not be stated. However, I was not disappointed. All around me I saw the work of a man who though I had not met, I felt I knew already. There is so much of Willsher in his work. And he seems to have found something which satisfies him and which can bear restatement. If an artist discovers something so important, repetition becomes a fine art in itself. Who are galleries, critics and even fellow artists to tell him otherwise? What is the point of development unless it is honest? Change for change’s sake is pointless.
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So, Willsher, perhaps taking a leaf from a basic Japanese philosophy, restates, modifies, perfects but does not stray too far from the original inspiration. The cherry blossom branch, heavy with bloom has for thousands of years been a central symbol and inspiration. It is as significant now as when there were no videos and computers. It has a potency and a truth. When I think of Willsher’s work or picture it in my mind, music is very often the very next thought. These sculptures appear to be solid representations of chunks of scores, snatches of song harmonies and discordances mixed together in a curious, slightly unnerving orchestra. Some shapes, with high wings spreading triumphantly above to sharp points, are like tuning forks. Most, through the repetition of line, resemble sound waves or perhaps the familiar effect of a stone being dropped into a still pool. Sometimes the shapes are obviously in competition with one another. There is a dialogue which is far from friendly, or fancifully the smaller pieces of carved wood or cast bronze might remind one of angry mouths shouting abuse or locked in heated debate. There is a tension and pressure contained in a very exact space which only serves to intensify the feeling. Brian Willsher’s work has an obvious linear quality akin to drawing. He is literally applying the same techniques. Those curved or sharp lines, shadows resembling shading and the use of space around and in between, like so much blank paper reinforce the idea. Some works may remind one of the intricate tribal pieces of Scottie Wilson, others may recall some early Cubist masters. But, undeniably, Willsher’s voice is his own. It is gentle but insistent. Persuasive, perhaps. It may be fair to say that the goal of every artist’s life is to find and depict a central truth, something which strikes a chord not only in the soul of the creator but also those who look upon his work. It is difficult for an artist to admit that he has found that truth. But then, some artists simply find it sooner than others.
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THE BRONZES
“Contradicting everything that has been done before” INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF ART CRITICS
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XANADU The name of the mythical nowhere place where impossible dreams may be enacted is commemorated in the double doors of delusion and awry windows that portray in abstraction the magnificence of its happy madness.
XANADU, 62 CM HIGH LIMITED EDITION OF 9 PHOTO: SOPHIE DUNCAN
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CLAUDIAN LANDSCAPE The terraces, ruined castles and waterfalls always featured in the romantic eighteenth century landscapes of Claude Lorrain - but which nevertheless goaded Turner to jealousy - are gently derided here in abstraction, guying the calculated formula behind the ‘artless’ picturesqueness. It is the good-humoured joshing of one artist by another. CLAUDIAN LANDSCAPE, 58 CM HIGH LIMITED EDITION OF 9. PHOTO: STEVEN GRAY.
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HEROIC HEAD The helmeted and visored structure, referring to the classical images of all legendary warriors of antiquity, in this case ironically encloses emptiness. The work poses the question: “Was there ever anything really more there? Was heroism only on minstrels’ lips, and the actuality the emptiness of fear?”
HEROIC HEAD, 56 CM HIGH LIMITED EDITION OF 9. PHOTO: STEVEN GRAY. MICHAEL AND JACQUELINE EDWARDS COLLECTION
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SOFT PERCEPTIONS An insect-like construction staring out interrogatively, it is also inward-looking. A dormant force held in a stasis of reflections, it offers a sphinx-like air of offering itself for appraisal, but at the same time appraising too. In green bronze, we are offered an enigma of waiting and expectancy without further explanation.
SOFT PERCEPTIONS, 43 CM HIGH LIMITED EDITION OF 9. PHOTO: STEVEN GRAY.
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S A L U T E T O H E N RY M O O R E (For Defending my work Against the Authorities) In this sculpture, commemorating his bruising encounter with Government bureaucrats in 1968 who declaredoutrightly that his work was not recognised as sculpture, Willsher savagely gives a behemoth’s mask to all bureaucracy, incarnating its idiocy, ignorance and brutality in an indelible image. SALUTE TO HENRY MOORE, 57 CM HIGH LIMITED EDITION OF 9. PHOTO: STEVEN GRAY.
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T H E P R I N C E O F WA R A classic work combining the symbolism of martial leadership, war and heroism pensively compounded in an unfurled and flowing flag of bronze, interrupted only by the raucous megaphone of oratory, exhorting patriotism, self-sacrifice and destiny.
THE PRINCE OF WAR, 70 CM HIGH LIMITED EDITION OF 9. PHOTO: GUY POLAINE. COURTESY: MUSEE ADZAK, PARIS.
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THE SECOND COMING A sculpture on the burning Dostoevskian question of what would happen to Christ if he returned a second time, is the subject of an abstracted mask of renewed and greater suffering, showing the artist shares Dostoevsky’s cynicism.
THE SECOND COMING, 57 CM HIGH LIMITED EDITION OF 9. PHOTO: GUY POLAINE. COURTESY MUSEE ADZAK, PARIS.
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THE STORM The daemonic forces of nature, predicating the precariousness of existence are delineated here in a vortex of wind-driven waves engulfing the small door of human survival. The depiction is of an ominous contest, forever in doubt.
THE STORM, 63 CMS HIGH LIMITED EDITION OF 9. PHOTO: STEVEN GRAY.
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MILLENIA The ending of the millennium and the onset of the new is the inspiration behind this machinelike, inscrutable structure embodying automation, robotisation, super-computers and all else in changed thinking. Is it benevolent or adversorial? Both challenging and elegiac, it is enigmatic.
MILLENNIA, 29 CM HIGH LIMITED EDITION OF 9. PHOTO: STEVEN GRAY. HUGO BURGE, MARCHMONT COLLECTION
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T H E G E O M E T RY OF RESPONSE This work might be called Two Forms Ascending From a Main Stem, because its concern is about the electricity generated between two interacting, rising columns or masses. That they be graceful and beautiful from an outside viewpoint is irrelevant to their own existence. Theirs is a vision of parity excluding all else.
THE GEOMETRY OF RESPONSE, 92 CM HIGH LIMITED EDITION OF 9. PHOTO: STEVEN GRAY. HUGO BURGE , MARCHMONT COLLECTION
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C O N C E N T R AT I O N An organic configuration, this work concentrates diverging and converging entities into a compelling mask of dignified authority, transported as if from another planet. The conjecture this sculpture poses is perhaps that outer space exploration will introduce strange presences unlike ourselves, and can we communicate with them without fear? CONCENTRATION, 39 CM HIGH LIMITED EDITION OF 9. PHOTO: STEVEN GRAY. CHIANCIANO ART MUSEUM COLLECTION
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CASABLANCA The name of Casablanca resonates as a special place for travellers and dreamers. The singular beauty of the sculpture, a masterly abstraction of Casablanca’s enclosed architecture and passageways, echoes that romanticism in precise and elegant lines. The nostalgia of the cabaret piano playing “As Time Goes By” in the classic film with Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman goes inescapably with it.
CASABLANCA, 59 CM HIGH LIMITED EDITION OF 9. PHOTO: STEVEN GRAY.
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HELIOS The radiance of the sun has ever been the source of inspiration to sculptors and painters, and this is a sublime example, cast in the form of an invocation. Nothing is allowed to interrupt the symbolism the warm life-giving rays that represents the triumph of Summer.
HELIOS, 70 CM HIGH LIMITED EDITION OF 9 PHOTO: SOPHIE DUNCAN. CHIANCIANO ART MUSEUM COLLECTION
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SUNDANCERS Two interlocking shapes caught in a swirl of responsive and concerted Dionysian abandonment to the joy of Summer. There is a manifest exultancy in this work reminiscent of Matisse’s treatment of the same theme, and might well have been inspired by it.
SUN DANCERS, 41 CM HIGH LIMITED EDITION OF 9. PHOTO: STEVEN GRAY. GAGLIARDI GALLERY LONDON
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ETUDE Essentially reflecting the harmony of pure form, this piece mirrors Willsher’s feelings about the conjunction of music with the arrangement of everything tangible, particularly in its direction and mass. ‘Etude’ should be regarded as an expression and response to rhythmic inspiration.
ETUDE, 62 CM HIGH LIMITED EDITION OF 9 PHOTO: SOPHIE DUNCAN
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METROPOLIS In this sculpture the congestion of people living on top of one another in the closely packed buildings of modern cities, is caught through the shorthand of abstraction, deftly concentrating building levels, windows and sky outlines into geometric symmetry.
METROPOLIS, 44.5 CM HIGH LIMITED EDITION OF 9. PHOTO: GUY POLAINE.
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ENVOY The Envoy, bringing good news or bad, whether Cassandra, Jeremiah, or Mountjoy, Henry V’s Herald, is always the omen of abrupt change, to be received fearfully. This sculpture could be of the Zeitgeist itself, emburdened with the authority to create wider anxiety.
ENVOY, 29 CM HIGH LIMITED EDITION OF 9. PHOTO: GUY POLAINE. COURTESY: MUSEE ADZAK, PARIS.
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I N VA D I N G P U R P L E A war-like form embodying inhumanity and belligerence. The sculptor’s abstraction reduces inflicted violence to machine-like impersonality, enhancing the horror of indiscriminate destruction. The work invents the spectre of irrationality, threatening universal life.
INVADING PURPLE, 37 CM HIGH LIMITED EDITION OF 9. COURTESY OF MESSRS. CHRISTIE’S. GAGLIARDI GALLERY LONDON
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CONSTRUCTION VIII Inspired initially by the idea of a diamond (reected in its baseplate), as a symbol of wealth and worth in society, Willsher concludes in this abstraction, that all invented power re-routes itself in a self-serving circuitry of dispatched and returning patterns, meaningless to most, but beautiful to watch.
CONSTRUCTION VIII, 57 CM HIGH LIMITED EDITION OF 9. PHOTO: STEVEN GRAY. CHIANCIANO ART MUSEUM COLLECTION
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PHAEDO Solely remembered as the other party to Pliny’s discourse on the death of Socrates and his consequent monologue on immortality, Phaedo is made an abstraction of all relayed and stored ideas.
PHAEDO, 26 CM HIGH LIMITED EDITION OF 9. PHOTO: STEVEN GRAY. GAGLIARDI GALLERY LONDON
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DOPPELGANGER This work is based on the disconcerting idea that, walking the streets somewhere, there is the exact double of each one of us. But the disquieting mirror image we are given here provokes the question: “If that is me, who am I?” Brian Willsher offers the narcissistic reversal as the imponderable of identity itself.
DOPPELGANGER, 38 CM HIGH LIMITED EDITION OF 9. PHOTO: COURTESY OF MESSRS. SOTHEBY’S HUGO BURGE, MARCHMONT COLLECTION
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PA E N Classically, the title means a song of praise or triumph for deliverance to Apollo or Artemis. Paian, from which it was derived, was the physician of the Gods, and the chant was from those healed from sickness on returning to happiness. This sculpture, with upward owing lines, reects the joy addressed to the Heavens and its embodiment.
PAEN, 41 CM HIGH LIMITED EDITION PHOTO: STEVEN GRAY.
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THE SECRET The potency of something extraordinary enshrouded in silence is here represented by the abstraction of a conchshell-form, virtually closed to a direct approach, but poised to close even more completely on the mystery withheld. The darkness of secrecy invites conjectures about danger, revelation, and, more pungently, about fear.
THE SECRET, 57 CM HIGH LIMITED EDITION OF 9 PHOTO: STEVEN GRAy. HUGO BURGE, MARCHMONT COLLECTION
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M E LT I N G T O R S O The eventual subsidence of all spirituality, intelligence and personality into indistinguishable dust, contradicting the idea of human uniqueness, is resolutely denied in a bronze abstraction aimed to withstand Time itself.
MELTING TORSO, 32 CM HIGH LIMITED EDITION OF 9. PHOTO: STEVEN GRAY. GAGLIARDI GALLERY LONDON
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CONSTRUCTION XVIII This enigmatic abstraction is an essay in creative aesthetics, and a sculptor’s piece ruminating on the visual tactility of defined projections interrupting a curving field and opposing a continuous overhanging curtain. Aesthetically, the stationing of these projections offer changing significance depending on the viewpoint.
CONSTRUCTION XVIII, 40 CM HIGH LIMITED EDITION OF 9. PHOTO: STEVEN GRAY. HUGO BURGE, MARCHMONT COLLECTION
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HOW CAN I EXPLAIN (Portrait of Theo and Vincent Van Gogh) This muted and deliberately understated sculpture grieves, through two uted forms, a relationship of interdependancy that still harrows all imaginative and creative people. The slightest tilting of one form the the other infers the passionate incoherence and coming tragedy.
HOW CAN I EXPLAIN, 56 CM HIGH LIMITED EDITION OF 9. PHOTO: STEVEN GRAY.
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THERMOPYLAE Pan-Hellenic classicism and contemporary abstraction meet in this masterpiece recalling Leonidas and his three hundred Spartans killed defending Greece against the Persians. Here, Willsher produces a sculpture, flouting time, so haunting it could be a relic retrieved from the battlefield itself.
THERMOPYLAE, 41.5 CM HIGH LIMITED EDITION OF 9 PHOTO: STEVEN GRAY.
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SORROW A curved monolithic construction radiating out in ever-widening waves from a central vacuum, Willsher infers the emptiness of loss and its resonances. It is a statement perhaps of personal grief, but here broadened into a universal image of suffering.
SORROW, 67 CM HIGH LIMITED EDITION OF 9. PHOTO: STEVEN GRAY. HUGO BURGE, MARCHMONT COLLECTION
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SPRINGTIME Spring, the season of renewal and hope, is celebrated in a sculpture pulsating with primordial energy, almost a lightning conductor of the Life Drive itself. Here we are given a breathtaking tour-de-force revealing how peerless abstraction can take an age old inspiration laden with cliches and re-pour it into revelationary excitement. It is the graphic shorthand of genius.
SPRINGTIME, 14 CM HIGH LIMITED EDITION OF 9. PHOTO: COURTESY MESSRS. SOTHEBY’S.
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ORPHEUS The soaring forms of this sculpture create, in the space separating them, the ghost of a third form portraying the radiant aeriality of supreme genius. This powerful conception deďŹ nes in bronze the myth of the greatest poet, singer and musician conceivable to man’s mind before the actuality of Leonardo. An example of empathy criss-crossing centuries, it is a monument to everything vibrantly harmonic.
ORPHEUS, 81 CM HIGH LIMITED EDITION OF 9. PHOTO: STEVEN GRAY.
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BIOGRAPHY Born in South London, 1930 Near fatal accident, motorbike racing Whilst recuperating began creating his first works in wood in ‘totem’ forms. Two sculptures shown at the Royal Academy annual, for four successive years Two one-man exhibitions at the Southern Cross Gallery, Melbourne, Australia One-man exhibition at the Alwin Gallery, London. In this year Sir Henry Moore and Sir Herbert Read hailed Brian Willsher as a new unique voice in British sculpture. Exhibition at the Nicholas Treadwell Gallery, London and the Southern Cross, Melbourne, Australia. Ceased exhibiting at public galleries. Rediscovered by Bill Hopkins the art critic who reintroduced him to London’s West End galleries. Hopkins also persuaded him to perpetuate his work in bronzes. Solo exhibition at the Blenheim Gallery, London. International Contemporary Art Fair, Los Angeles, U.S.A Birch and Conran Gallery, London. Eva Jekyll Gallery, London. Camden Galleries, London. Boundary Gallery, London. Belgrave Gallery, London. International Contemporary Art Fair, London. Camden Galleries, London. Shurini Gallery, London. Musee Adzak, Paris, France. Belgrave Gallery, London. Camden Galleries, London. Shurini Gallery, London. Musee Adzak, Paris, France. Belgrave Gallery. Karl and Faber, Munich. Musee Adzak, Paris, France. Shurini Gallery, London. Gagliardi Gallery, London. Woodlands Art Gallery, Blackheath, London. Chianciano Art Museum permanent collection Died in 2010.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY The Observer, 31st March, 1968. The Guardian, 1st April 1968. Arts Review, Edward Phelps, November 17th, 1989. The Hill Magazine, November 1989 The Times, March 22nd, 1990. Sunday Times, May 27th, 1990. Art Review, October, 1993.
C ATA L O G U E S Boundary Gallery, February 1990. Belgrave Gallery, March 1990. Karl and Faber, Munich 1992 Gagliardi Gallery, ‘Bronzes’, October 1993. Belgrave Gallery, ‘Wood Sculptures‘ September, 1994 Messrs. Sotheby’s: (Modern British Sculptures) July 1st, 1990; July 1st, 1991; September 30th, 1992; October 6th, 1993. Messrs. Christies: (Modem British Sculptures) June 7th, 1990; November 9th, 1990; June 7th, 1991; September 22nd, 1991; November 8th, 1991; June 11th, 1992; March 26th, 1993; May 14th, 1993; November 7th, 1993 Messrs. Phillips: (Modern British Sculptures) August 18th, 1989. Messrs. Bonhams: (Modern British Sculptures) October 9th, 1990.
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Published by Gagliardi Art & Partners 509 Kings Road, Chelsea, London, SW10 0TX Special Thanks to Roberto Gagliardi Curated by Timothy Warrington, International Confederation of Art Critics Layout by Victoria Ludwig and Alessandra Negro 2015 Š Gagliardi Art & Partners www.gagliardi.co.uk
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