19
May – 25 August 2003
Tate Modern, Turbine Hall
Admission free
Henry
Moore: Public Sculptures brings together around twenty works
by the sculptor in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern. The display focuses
on the large monumental public sculptures that Henry Moore (1898-1986)
made from the 1940s onwards including many of the most important examples.
The selection includes
a number of very important loans and covers over twenty years of Moore’s
career. It includes his first large public commission Madonna and Child
1943 on loan from the Church of St Matthew, Northampton. In the following
years Moore made some of the best-known public sculptures of the period
including the Barclay School Family Group 1949, the Festival of Britain
Reclining Figure 1951, King and Queen 1952-3, Upright Motive No.1 1955-6,
Glenkiln Cross 1955-6 and Atom Piece (Working Model for Nuclear Energy)
1964-5. The selection is predominantly drawn from the Tate Collection,
which benefited from the artist’s substantial gift in 1978. This
is the second display in the Turbine Hall drawn from sculptures in the
Tate Collection, following The Upright Figure in 2002.
Departing from the
recent focus on Moore’s pre-war work, the display brings attention
to the considerable formal and conceptual range of his mature work. In
his lifetime, Moore’s reputation as Britain’s leading sculptor
was established by his public sculptures. Sited throughout the world,
these works address a global audience in an uncompromising modernist idiom.
They are assured and inventive, demonstrating a remarkable formal variety
and breadth of ideas.
Henry Moore studied
at the Leeds College of Art (1919-1921), and the Royal College of Art,
London (1921-1925). While at College in London he was encouraged by Epstein
to study primitive art. He travelled to Paris in 1923 to study the work
of the contemporary sculptors Picasso and Brancusi, and to Italy in 1925
where he was inspired by the work of Giotto and Masaccio. He had his first
one man exhibition in 1928 of sculpture characterised by its truth to
materials and its vitality. 1928 was also the year he received his first
public commission – the West Wind relief on the London Transport
building, St James’s, London. In 1933 he was a founder-member of
Unit One with Nash, Hepworth and Nicholson. Moore’s work in the
1930s straddled the two rival camps of European Modernism: Surrealism
and Abstraction. Between 1940-3 he worked as a war artist. The Shelter
Drawings, which showed the suffering and stoicism of Londoners taking
shelter from the Blitz, established a mass audience for Moore’s
graphic works. The large monumental sculptures he made over the next forty
years established him as one of the most well-known artists of the twentieth
century.
The display is curated
by Tate Curators Matthew Gale and Toby Treves. It is supported by The
Henry Moore Foundation.
For further information,
please contact Calum Sutton, Tate Press Office
Call 020 7887 8730/8858 Fax 020 7887 8729 Email pressoffice@tate.org.uk
Visit www.tate.org.uk
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