In bringing together sculptural works from different periods of Barry Flanagan’s long and productive career and a selection of drawings and prints, this exhibition reveals the persistent ability of the artist to challenge and invent. The title of the exhibition, Hare Coursed, was chosen by Flanagan. It acts as a reference to the creature who has populated the imagery of so much of the artist’s work in the last twenty-five years and alludes to the hunting of hares by lurchers, now outlawed in this country, and a pursuit that is notable for the negation of scent but elevation of sight.

Flanagan was born in Prestatyn, North Wales in 1941. He studied at Birmingham College of Art and Crafts and after a gap of seven years went on to St. Martin’s School of Art in London in 1964. His work of the late 1960s challenged the very materiality of sculptural form and practice. In contrast to many of his immediate contemporaries he employed materials that were simple and organic in origin. His most significant works from this period were constructed from hessian, sand, rope and wood. Of these early works, the New Art Centre shall be showing 2 February ‘73 (1973), a layered collage of canvas, which hangs from a simple wooden bar. In its ability to command and define space, there is an echo of the figurative sculpture that was to follow and by which Flanagan has been latterly defined.

After 1973 most of Flanagan’s work centred increasingly on freestanding abstract forms that possessed a greater sense of solidity and weight than his earlier pieces. Untitled (1984) is one such work, composed of stacked lumps of Tuscan travertine, whose sides are marked with deliberate and spare incisions and cuts. It is a piece that seems to defy time and categorisation, primordial but contemporary, self contained and yet shaped by man.

This sense of archetype and recurrent form manifests itself in the work for which Flanagan has become most widely recognised and known, his figurative bronzes of animals, and most notably, those of the hare. The hare is a creature found in folklore across the globe, from the Americas to the Far East, from Europe to Africa. It is this animal character who has populated much of Flanagan’s work for the last thirty years and is, in his own words, a figure that ‘can carry the conventions of the cartoon and the attributes of the human into the animal world’. In the show are several large bronzes in which the hare dances triumphant, poses nonchalantly, moves with abandon and grace, and though recognisable, often physiologically akin to human form, these animals seem nonetheless to be psychologically apart, as if the words which could shape them have been lost to modern man, derisive of myth and fable.

Included in this exhibition are drawings and prints by Flanagan, some of them previously unseen. Flanagan is a prolific and accomplished draughtsman. His drawings are eloquent and lyrical, accomplished with the simplest of lines that trace with tenderness and precision the object of his gaze. Horses are captured in a gouache so fresh and blue that it reminds one of lapis lazuli and their inherent jauntiness which motion transcends into grace is perfectly captured by the brush. Nudes are tenderly portrayed, portraits sensitively sketched and landscape rendered with the minimum of detail and the greatest of observation.

The New Art Centre currently shows 30ft Acrobats that, like the hares which have been exhibited in other outdoor spaces such as Park Avenue, New York, Grant Part, Chicago, and O’Connell Street, Dublin, has succeeded in captivating scores of visitors to Roche Court. This promises to be an exhibition that shall further this enchantment and place alongside this quintessentially Flanagan work already sited at Roche, the fruits of his other endeavours.

Flanagan represented Britain at the Venice Biennale in 1982. A major retrospective of his work was held at the Fundación 'La Caixa' Madrid in 1993, touring to the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Nantes in 1994. In 1999, he had a solo exhibition at Galerie Xavier Hufkens in Brussels followed by an exhibition at the Tate Gallery, Liverpool (2000). In 2002, a major exhibition of his work was shown at the Kunsthalle Recklinghausen, Germany, and toured to the Musée d'Art moderne et d'Art contemporain, Nice. In 2006 he had a large retrospective at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin.

Flanagan's work is held in public collections worldwide including MOMA New York, the Royal Academy of Arts in London, and the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. He is represented by Waddington Galleries and Galerie Lelong.

For further information and images, please contact Briony Biles or Victoria Avery on 01980 862244.

The New Art Centre is open daily from 11am to 4pm.

Roche Court, East Winterslow, Salisbury, Wiltshire SP5 1BG

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