PRESENTATION:Phyllida Barlow-unscripted

For almost 60 years, British artist Phyllida Barlow took inspiration from her surroundings to create imposing installations that can be at once menacing and playful. She created large-scale yet anti-monumental sculptures from inexpensive, low-grade materials such as cardboard, fabric, plywood, polystyrene, scrim, plaster and cement. These constructions were often painted in industrial or vibrant colors, the seams of their construction left at times visible, revealing the means of their making.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Hauser & Wirth Gallery Archive

The exhibition “unscripted” brings together a collection of the Phyllida Barlow’s signature elements from several major installations, as well as a number of free-standing sculptures ranging from the early 1970s to work made in the last year of Barlow’s life. The landscape, courtyards and gardens beyond the galleries are animated and disrupted by a selection of sculptures, including “PRANK”, a series of seven wonderfully—and deliberately—ungainly sculptures Barlow made for New York’s City Hall Park in 2023, shown for the first time in the UK. The exhibition also features previously unseen smaller-scale works, including drawings and maquettes. These works reinforce the important role the studio played in Barlow’s practice, whilst conveying the restless energy, endless curiosity and unabated ambition which are as much a part of Barlow’s legacy as are the works themselves. The title ‘unscripted’ refers to the experimental and iterative nature of Barlow’s working process, allowing each project to evolve through a process of making, unmaking and remaking, involving chance and mishap as well as changes of mind. She saw this working practice as akin to processes of growth, decay and renewal in nature. Barlow was aware of the forthcoming exhibition and had begun to think seriously about bringing her interest in painting to the fore. The exhibition opens with singular works that span almost four decades of Barlow’s career, ranging from the remake of “shedmesh, 1975 – 2020” (1975 – 2020), to two of the artist’s last works, “untitled: hollow; 2022” (2022) and “untitled: modernsculpture; 2022” (2022). These works are part of a continuous investigation of the language and possibilities of sculpture, which emerged as Barlow found her voice as a student through exploring the legacy of British and European post-war sculpture. Key works in this display make references to other artists who became part of her internal conversation for many years, notably Alighiero Boetti, Eva Hesse and Tony Smith. These works engage critically with the grid and cube of minimalism, post-minimalism’s resistance to geometry and the materiality of Arte Povera. The exhibition also, combines large-scale elements originally conceived for several different installations including “folly” (2017), Barlow’s acclaimed British Pavilion for the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017. This engages with the artist’s ongoing interest in states of urban destruction and unrest, reflecting on Barlow’s fascination for natural and human-driven disaster, stretching back to her memories of bomb-damaged London, as well as her interest in monuments and fallen monuments. During her final years, Barlow was increasingly recycling elements of one project into another, or enabling individual items a future life liberated from its original context. This gallery takes this habit as its methodology; key gatherings of works are inspired by juxtapositions Barlow made from disparate parts and which can be found in photographic documentation of her exhibitions. Other choices and sequences take care to respect some of Barlow’s key principles and preferences, for example she preferred to block entrances and exits, inducing curiosity in the viewer. She often placed obstacles in the way of visitors, in their pathway or disturbing their line of site. There were periods in Barlow’s life where her principal activity as an artist took place in the studio. This was the case for months and years during her teaching career when significant exhibition opportunities were harder to come by, whilst raising a young family, and was also the case more recently during lockdown. Another space focuses on these more private aspects of Barlow’s practice and speak to forms of ‘open’ experimentation. “TORSO” and “LOAF” (1986 – 1989) are among the earliest works included, alongside maquettes and drawings, often made in the genesis of larger-scale works and have never been shown in public. Over the course of a long career there were images and forms, materials and subjects that occurred over and over in Barlow’s work and held a special significance for her. The Another gallery foregrounds “untitled: double act” (2010), and combines two adjacent spheres each speared by a vertical intrusion, one in the form of a ring, the other a disc. The reference to theatre in the title evokes Barlow’s longstanding interest in theatre and the staging of her work for audiences. Here the double act, was effectively an ‘in conversation’ with Nairy Baghramian who she exhibited alongside at the Serpentine Gallery the same year, and point to Barlow’s continuing interest in and responsiveness to her peers. Barlow’s first and last group of paintings on canvas is on display. Small-scale and captivating, these paintings stand in lieu of what was to have been a major new adventure. The works represent motifs repeatedly explored in her sculpture, including several works on display elsewhere in the exhibition, while others touch on primary themes and interests in her art and life. The painterly experiments were part of a move to larger-scale canvases that were to be debuted in this very exhibition.

Photo: Phyllida Barlow, untitled: smallpainting; 15, 2022 – 2023, Acrylic on paper, 25.5 x 30.7 x 2 cm / 10 x 12 1/8 x 3/4 in, © Phyllida Barlow Estate, Photo: Eva Herzog, Courtesy Phyllida Barlow Estate and Hauser & Wirth Gallery

Info: Curator: Frances Morris, Hauser & Wirth Gallery, Durslade Farm Dropping Lane, Bruton Somerset, United Kingdom, Duration: 25/5/2024-15/1/2025, Days & Hours: Thu-Sun 12:00-17:00, www.hauserwirth.com/