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Back to nature

Andrew Lambirth

Wednesday, 13th February 2008

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

In London, to coincide with the opening of the Leeds show, is a mini-retrospective of Abrahams’s main sculptural themes, mounted by the Mayor Gallery, 22a Cork Street, W1, which has for many years represented his work. This fascinating exhibition is short-lived, ending on 21 February, and since it contains not only fine examples of earlier work (featuring the garden, figures in movement and the more recent and magnificently individual animal sculptures) but also his very latest developments, it is essential viewing. Abrahams is currently exploring architectural structures of painted steel, a cross between towers and totems, which build horizontal elements such as windows and curtains, and eventually gardens, into the vertical matrix. Once again this remarkable and curiously underrated artist is breaking new ground. As he puts it, ‘I’ve never had such freedom working on the horizontal and vertical at the same time,’ and he’s making very good use of it.

I went to Leeds for the Ivor Abrahams show, so it was a bonus to discover that the accompanying exhibition in the main galleries, entitled Against Nature, is such an enjoyable group of works. I might quibble with the slightly intrusive exhibition design, with its dominant oval theme, but the sculptures selected to illustrate the exhibition’s thesis make an intriguing display. The show’s title comes from J-K Huysmans’ influential decadent novel A Rebours, variously translated as ‘Against Nature’ or ‘Against the Grain’, a kind of manual of the extravagant aestheticism of the fin de siècle. The exhibition traverses late 19th- and 20th-century fantasy sculpture, exploring its hybrid forms under the three subdivisions of ‘Metamorphic Creatures’, ‘Modern Monsters’ and ‘Hortisculpture’.

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