A seminal theme in the British sculptor Lynn Chadwick’s oeuvre, Teddy Boy and Girl II is a defning three-dimensional masterpiece of post-war British sculpture. Encompassing a new modern aesthetic in a world rebuilding itself after the turmoil of the Second World War, the present work was commissioned by Venezuelan writer, journalist and politician Miguel Otero Silva, afer viewing a smaller variation of the work at the 1957 to 1959 travelling exhibition Ten Young British Sculptors. The exhibition featured Chadwick’s sculptural work alongside a selection of artist contemporaries, namely Kenneth Armitage, Eduardo Paolozzi and William Turnbull. Organised by the British Council, the exhibition began at Sao Paulo’s IV Biennial of the Museum of Modern Art, where Chadwick’s work was shown alongside the paintings of William Scott and Peter Lanyon. The exhibition travelled to Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, Montevideo, Santiago and Lima, fnally concluding in Caracas. Housed in the collection of Otero Silva, a patron of Caracas’ Galería de Arte Nacional which opened in 1976, the present work is the frst of the four works from the edition borne from Otero Silva’s commission and is the only work to include a base plate, making the work a rare and life size formulation of one of the artist’s key sculptural concerns: the Teddy Boy and Girl.
‘What I was doing was getting some sort of attitude between two people.’ Lynn Chadwick
Teddy boy and girl jiving at the Black Raven club in London
Lynn Chadwick with maquette for Teddy Boy and Girl, 1956
Image: Getty Images
© Lypiatt Studio Ltd.
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