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Ensayo del lote
Defined by a dynamic combination of playful humour and calculated form, Barry Flanagan’s Six Foot Leaping Hare on Steel Pyramid is a monumental display of the artist’s most celebrated and iconic motif, the hare. Conceived in 1990 at an impressive height of 2.5 metres, the present work strikingly juxtaposes form and material as Flanagan’s organic hare leaps, limbs outstretched and sinuous, atop an angular steel base. Grounded only by the tip of the pyramid, Flanagan’s elusive creature is captured in a fleeting moment of motion, yet powerfully memorialised in bronze in a celebration of its magnificence.
Dynamic visual and ideological tensions imbue the present work with a visceral sense of immediacy and vitality. Leaping out, far above the ground, Flanagan’s beast is an emblem of freedom, motion and curiosity. Yet the hare is prevented from leaping away by the gradual pull of its immovable geometric base, itself echoing imprisonment in its cage-like form. This subtle interplay between liberty and restraint characterises the work’s innovative unity of contrasts.
Praised by Enrique Juncosa as ‘one of the most personal and recognisable artistic endeavours of the second half of [the twentieth] century’, Flanagan’s bronze hares have their roots in a fleeting encounter with a hare bounding across the snowy Sussex Downs near the artist’s studio (Barry Flanagan, exh. cat., Waddington Galleries, London, 1994, p. 5). First rendered in a drawing of a hare leaping over a pair of tortoises dating from the autumn of 1979, by 1980, Flanagan was producing leaping, standing, dancing and even boxing hares, all animated with the artist’s ingenious marrying of whimsical humour and mastery of form.
Flanagan’s fascination with hares has been linked to various artistic and literary sources, including Joan Miró, Albrecht Dürer and even Yves Klein, suspended in space after jumping from a rooftop in the iconic image Leaping into the Void (1960). Encountering George Ewart Evans and David Thompson’s cultural history of the animal The Leaping Hare (1972) also introduced Flanagan to the hare’s wide-ranging symbolic and mythological significance. In Chinese mythology, the hare is associated with the moon and represents immortality, often pictured pounding a pestle and mortar in the creation of the elixir of life. In ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, the hare signifies existence, or the verb ‘to be’. Transcending cultures and centuries, hares have been fabled throughout history as creatures of curiosity, cleverness and trickery, and at times reflections of ourselves.
Whilst acknowledging these abundant symbolic implications, Flanagan has expressed his attraction to the hare as a ‘rich and expressive form that can carry the conventions of the cartoon and the attributes of the human into the animal world’ (quoted in Barry Flanagan: Sculptures 1965-2005, exh. cat., Museum of Art and City Gallery, The Hugh Lane, Dublin, 2006, p. 65). Alert to the animal’s ability to express complex human emotions, particularly through its elongated ears, Flanagan’s anthropomorphic hares are both personifications of the human character, and symbols of humanity itself. Six Foot Leaping Hare on Steel Pyramid is exemplary of Flanagan’s innovative fusion of playful forms and evocative artistry in a joyous celebration of vitality.
Dynamic visual and ideological tensions imbue the present work with a visceral sense of immediacy and vitality. Leaping out, far above the ground, Flanagan’s beast is an emblem of freedom, motion and curiosity. Yet the hare is prevented from leaping away by the gradual pull of its immovable geometric base, itself echoing imprisonment in its cage-like form. This subtle interplay between liberty and restraint characterises the work’s innovative unity of contrasts.
Praised by Enrique Juncosa as ‘one of the most personal and recognisable artistic endeavours of the second half of [the twentieth] century’, Flanagan’s bronze hares have their roots in a fleeting encounter with a hare bounding across the snowy Sussex Downs near the artist’s studio (Barry Flanagan, exh. cat., Waddington Galleries, London, 1994, p. 5). First rendered in a drawing of a hare leaping over a pair of tortoises dating from the autumn of 1979, by 1980, Flanagan was producing leaping, standing, dancing and even boxing hares, all animated with the artist’s ingenious marrying of whimsical humour and mastery of form.
Flanagan’s fascination with hares has been linked to various artistic and literary sources, including Joan Miró, Albrecht Dürer and even Yves Klein, suspended in space after jumping from a rooftop in the iconic image Leaping into the Void (1960). Encountering George Ewart Evans and David Thompson’s cultural history of the animal The Leaping Hare (1972) also introduced Flanagan to the hare’s wide-ranging symbolic and mythological significance. In Chinese mythology, the hare is associated with the moon and represents immortality, often pictured pounding a pestle and mortar in the creation of the elixir of life. In ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, the hare signifies existence, or the verb ‘to be’. Transcending cultures and centuries, hares have been fabled throughout history as creatures of curiosity, cleverness and trickery, and at times reflections of ourselves.
Whilst acknowledging these abundant symbolic implications, Flanagan has expressed his attraction to the hare as a ‘rich and expressive form that can carry the conventions of the cartoon and the attributes of the human into the animal world’ (quoted in Barry Flanagan: Sculptures 1965-2005, exh. cat., Museum of Art and City Gallery, The Hugh Lane, Dublin, 2006, p. 65). Alert to the animal’s ability to express complex human emotions, particularly through its elongated ears, Flanagan’s anthropomorphic hares are both personifications of the human character, and symbols of humanity itself. Six Foot Leaping Hare on Steel Pyramid is exemplary of Flanagan’s innovative fusion of playful forms and evocative artistry in a joyous celebration of vitality.