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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 the first room, Fernand Khnopff’s extraordinary painted plaster ‘Mask’ (c.1897) is rather diminished by incarcerating it in a wall-mounted oval display case like a vertical eye, particularly noticeable when the other sculptures are disposed without protective covers on plinths and platforms. This lack of glass cases brings a great deal of immediacy to the exhibition, and makes it a delight to view, even when the objects are as hideous as Thomas Heine’s ‘Devil’ (1902–3), looking surprisingly like a Lord of the Rings cartoon nasty. In this room is Boccioni’s dynamic ‘Unique Forms of Continuity in Space’ (1913), a kind of striding figure, and some very unpleasant over-smooth Chimeras by the deservedly little-known Romanian Dimitrie Paciurea. Moving swiftly through into the Modern Monsters section, there’s a vast ‘Dying Centaur’ by Bourdelle (devotees of Harry Potter take note), a wonderfully amorphous Arp ‘Siren’, and Epstein’s ‘Rock Drill’ for a contrasting injection of certainty. The third room is the best, containing Ernst, Gonzalez and Noguchi in a well-chosen interactive trio of ‘Hortisculpture’. The tenor of the exhibition is scholarly (a shame the catalogue, with all its careful research, is not yet available), but the imagery should exert a wider appeal. And it’s refreshing to see a show of this limited size, as you really get a chance to address the works and the ideas behind them.

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