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Lot Essay
Earthy, informal and spirited, Rebecca Warren's SHE is a collection of six unique sculptures that create a bold new vision of the female form. Pulled, kneaded, shaped, and tugged into life from clay, the figures have exaggerated female focal points, but lack heads. Breasts, buttocks, hands and calves are almost grotesquely caricatured in a subversion of one of the most visited subjects in art history. Maintaining the evidence of her touch through the textured surfaces of her figures, Warren has emphasised the raw energy of their creation by placing the figures on MDF studio trolleys, rendering the clay dust, the residue of their inception, visible. The flexibility of clay appeals to Warren, allowing her to respond to the forms suggested by the material quickly and intuitively. The figures therefore have dynamism and freshness that give them both human and humorous qualities.
Illustrative of the tension between thought, visual clichés and the process of making itself, Warren's exuberant sculptures simultaneously challenge sculptural conventions while referencing an admiration for it. SHE evokes a powerful history of expressive figurative sculpture stretching from Degas and Rodin to Giacometti and German Expressionists. It is also a wry representation of Warren's fascination with artists who have overtly fetishised the female form: photographer Helmut Newton, cartoonist Robert Crumb, and Abstract Expressionist Willem de Kooning. Quoting from their imagery and uniting it with Warren's own distinct aesthetic, SHE highlights a shared interest in the sexualised representation of women. Her figures, both amorphous and recognizably figurative, evolve through a process of appropriation and reference as well as revelation and discovery.
Forming an entirely modern, complex and distinctive visual language, Warren's work has been shown in major group exhibitions such as Modern British Sculpture, Royal Academy of Arts, London, 2011; The Future Demands Your Participation: Contemporary Art from the British Council, 2011; Classified, Tate Britain, London, 2010; The Third Mind, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, 2007, as well as participated in the Venice Biennale, in 2011, and a major solo show at the Serpentine Gallery, London in 2009. She has been nominated for the Turner Prize and the Vincent Award.
Illustrative of the tension between thought, visual clichés and the process of making itself, Warren's exuberant sculptures simultaneously challenge sculptural conventions while referencing an admiration for it. SHE evokes a powerful history of expressive figurative sculpture stretching from Degas and Rodin to Giacometti and German Expressionists. It is also a wry representation of Warren's fascination with artists who have overtly fetishised the female form: photographer Helmut Newton, cartoonist Robert Crumb, and Abstract Expressionist Willem de Kooning. Quoting from their imagery and uniting it with Warren's own distinct aesthetic, SHE highlights a shared interest in the sexualised representation of women. Her figures, both amorphous and recognizably figurative, evolve through a process of appropriation and reference as well as revelation and discovery.
Forming an entirely modern, complex and distinctive visual language, Warren's work has been shown in major group exhibitions such as Modern British Sculpture, Royal Academy of Arts, London, 2011; The Future Demands Your Participation: Contemporary Art from the British Council, 2011; Classified, Tate Britain, London, 2010; The Third Mind, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, 2007, as well as participated in the Venice Biennale, in 2011, and a major solo show at the Serpentine Gallery, London in 2009. She has been nominated for the Turner Prize and the Vincent Award.