Galleries - November 2010

15. GALLERIES NOVEMBER 10 T RIPLE VISION M ARCELLE HANSELAAR Over the last decade or so Mar- celle Hanselaar has, through both her paintings and etchings, built up a substantial reputation for her powerful images of the sexual pol- itics of recent times – something the major survey show of her work planned for King's Place in Au- tumn 2011 should do much to en- hance. Meanwhile her most recent exhibition at Millennium (to 14 November) sees her work contin- uing to move forward and develop in some intriguing new directions. Having, fortuitously, just re- turned to England from an immer- sion in Flemish Art of both the Late Medieval and Symbolist/Moder- nist eras, I am, once again, partic- ularly reminded of Hanselaar's essential 'European-ness', above all the uncompromising savagery, laced with a very dark, surreal wit, of her imagery. It makes her latest cast of morose, defeated charac- ters, seem hardly able to lift their heads for the shame of it all. But Hanselaar also conveys her com- passion – and hopefully engages ours – towards these sad subjects with her richly glowing colours, tender, transparent glazes and strong drawing. The outcome is that we all be- come involved in their humanity and this, in turn, links us with the essential core feeling of emo- tional, expressive engagement that we have towards this very par- ticular artistic tradition. Jilly Szaybo LYNN CHADWICK Taken together with the Caro exhi- bition at the RBSS, this excellently put together mini-retrospective of Lynn Chadwick’s sculpture at Stowe School represents an ex- cellent opportunity to explore the very different career paths taken by two of the key figures in the 1950s/60s reaction to Henry Moore. Whereas Caro, a trusted workshop assistant to Moore, had broken loose through a brutally di- rect rejection of his master’s ass- umptions about carving and truth to materials, the largely self-taught Chadwick, born in 1914 (and thus from a generation earlier) came from an architectural/model mak- ing background, making mobiles for trade fairs and design compe- titions. This had hardened into something altogether more seri- ous when a Festival of Britain commission meant he had to learn to weld. De facto he became a constructor rather than a carver, evolving his own system of weld- ed frames and armatures onto which more solid forms could be imposed. Bullfrog (1953) is a su- perb example of the ground- breaking style that won him the Venice Biennale in 1953 and this show, drawn from the artist’s es- tate’s holdings, contains similarly representative examples right across his career in a show that launches Stowe’s quite superb new Rick Mather designed galleries. NU ANTHONY CARO It sometimes seems that one of the essential characteristics of a major artistic talent is to play fast and loose with our expectations. Anthony Caro’s latest show ( Con- temporary Sculpture Galleries at RBSS to 19 November) most cer- tainly does that, the sixteen small bronzes and sixteen large char- coal drawings of which it consists the tip of an iceberg of similar studies using the same female nude model in studios in the USA between 1983-89. Selected from the 168 small bronzes and 400+ large charcoal drawings, that come from this particular phase of working and all hitherto unseen in this country, they therefore repre- sent a largely unfamiliar and en- tirely unexpected side to our understanding of a sculptor we tend to think of in almost exclu- sively abstract terms. But the very fact that Caro has kept and is pre- pared now to show this work im- plies that we must take them quite as seriously as any of his other work. My initial reaction is that though apparently figurative and conveying a powerful sense of physical presence, they also dis- play a curious absence of psy- chological immediacy. With the drawings something similar is also apparent though on a much gran- der and more dramatic scale. A strong sense of Caro regrouping for the last decades of his working career is my immediate reaction. Nicholas Usherwood Anthony Caro Lynn Chadwick Marcelle Hansellaar ‘Visitor’