RSS

Contact us

Tuesday 2 December 2008

Back to nature

By Leafy Ways: Early Work by Ivor Abrahams
Against Nature: The hybrid forms of modern sculpture
Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, until 4 May

One such figure is Ivor Abrahams (born 1935). A figurative sculptor who studied at St Martin’s and Camberwell, he also had a practical training as an apprentice at the Fiorini Art bronze foundry and subsequently worked with Adele Rootstein, a pioneer maker of display mannequins. In the late 1960s he discovered the territory for which he was to become known: garden sculpture. Not sculptures to be put in your garden, but objects which took the idea of the garden and explored it as subject. In keeping with the ethos of the Sixties, Abrahams used a great deal of found imagery, trawling through popular gardening magazines, and selecting the more modest black-and-white photographs he found there, rather than the flaming colours of prize displays. He was drawn to marginal, low-key subjects: corners of shrubbery, a stretch of topiary, an overgrown wall. These found images were collated in notebooks, reinterpreted with colour as silkscreen prints, and then developed into three-dimensional form.

This has always been Abrahams’s line of development, from two-dimensional into three-dimensional imagery, as can be seen in this hugely enjoyable show of his Seventies work in the Mezzanine Gallery of the Henry Moore Institute. The title of the exhibition, By Leafy Ways, is taken from a film Abrahams made in 1971, a quick-fire succession of horticultural stills, some of real places, others of a model garden, in both black-and-white and colour. Rather like a flicker-book, the images take on a strange animation, which can be rather dizzying. Abrahams has adopted the suburban garden as his subject (you can hear cars passing amid the birdsong), and thus engages with such loaded issues as the confrontation between nature and artifice, and between the functional and the decorative. Here are some splendid relief prints in silkscreen and flock fibre, characterised by heightened colour, jazzy pattern and distinctive texture. Abrahams pioneered the use of flocking in art at a time when it was becoming a fashionable adjunct to society living, with pop stars having the exteriors of their cars flocked or — even more horribly — their bathroom suites. Here, too, are sculptures made from styrene and latex, which also employ metal and resin according to how crisp and geometric or swelling and organic their articulation needs to be.

Colour plays a significant role in its application to the ‘skin’ or surface of Abrahams’s objects. (It is remarkable how successfully he has overcome the partial colour-blindness which discouraged him from a career in painting and led him towards sculpture in the first place.) His essentially suburban and decorative subjects have really very little to do with landscape, and although once hung in a mixed show with the Brotherhood of Ruralists, as he says, ‘Ruralist I ain’t.’ Instead, his work edges round notions of kitsch and nostalgia and borders fruitfully on conceptual art without in any way jeopardising its imaginative visualisation. Abrahams’s work has a pronounced physical presence with a very individual and precise flavour. It is very good now to be reminded of his originality.

More articles from: Andrew Lambirth | this section

Print this article  |  Email to a friend  |  Permalink  |   Comment

Post this entry to:   del.icio.us | Digg | Newsvine | NowPublic | Reddit

Advertisement

Spectator Business | Apollo Magazine

Corporate | Advertising | Privacy | Terms

Spectator, 22 Old Queen Street, London, SW1H 9HP

All Articles and Content Copyright ©2008 by The Spectator | All Rights Reserved