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Sculptor of vision

Andrew Lambirth

Wednesday, 16th April 2008

Nigel Hall: Sculpture + Drawing 1965–2008
Yorkshire Sculpture Park, until 8 June

I noticed some skid-marks on ‘Kiss’, which indicate all too plainly that kids had been climbing on it. A sculpture park is not an adventure playground and children should be inculcated with respect for art, especially when it is work of calculated precision like Hall’s which even the slightest mark of bird lime can alter. One of my favourite of the outdoor sculptures is ‘The Now’, a green patinated bronze from 2000, consisting of a wedge like an axe blade leaning on an angled cone. Another is the swooping curve of ‘Wide Passage’ (2007) which traces a shallow trajectory between earth and sky before returning to earth again. The main part of the exhibition is housed in what are modestly called the Underground Galleries, the new buildings at YSP, which have a useful mix of natural and artificial light, as well as the floor space and height to do justice to a major show.

Here are four large galleries hung with a mixture of sculpture and drawings, superlatively displayed. I’ve never seen Hall’s work look so well. From the anteroom, in which a number of maquettes and small sculptures are arranged on four shelves, to the project space at the end, which is devoted to drawings, this suite of rooms is immaculately installed. Just to pick out a few favourites, look at: the arch with suspended clouds, called ‘Magnet’ (1966), like a portal to another world in gallery one; the piquant pink piping of ‘Geography of an Unnamed Place’, and the slow blue, black and green swirls of ‘Cedar of Lebanon’ (to be seen here with an actual cedar tree behind it through the window in the park), in gallery two; ‘Black Minus’ from 1975, a long extended tubing piece in the third gallery; and the sequence of recent big wooden pieces in the fourth gallery. The placing of these sculptures is breathtaking.

The Yorkshire Sculpture Park is an independent art gallery, a registered museum and charity, and has been in existence now for 30 years. It’s a beautiful place to visit, and there’s an excellent restaurant to re-stoke the inner self. If the weather is inclement, you can retreat to the galleries and study the smaller-scale work. It being April, there were showers when I visited, but the sunny intervals were sufficient to view all the outside sculptures, and the range of light from overcast to bright showed off the work in a variety of different aspects. More perhaps than some sculptors, Nigel Hall makes his sculptures to reveal themselves as you walk around them, so much so that still photography rarely does justice to them. The YSP, with its range of superb galleries and open spaces, is the perfect context for his work. The show looks terrific and will confirm to even the most cursory visitor that we celebrate here one of Britain’s major sculptors, an artist of decided integrity and vision.