Standing Horse

Horses first appear in Frink's work at the end of the 1960s when she moved to France and the semi-wild horses of the Carmargue region became a rich source of inspiration. When she returned to England in 1973 she continued to model horses, not on the throughbreds in her husband's stables, but on the short, stocky Carmargue horse, and later on the Asiatic Wild Horse from Mongolia and the horses depicted in Chinese art. The physicality of these representations particularly appealed to Frink and her horses convey a real sense of their own identity.

Edward Lucie Smith (op. cit., p. 46) comments on the later horse sculptures: 'The horses made in the 1980s represent a major thread of continuity in Frink's work, and in this sense can be placed alongside the male nudes and the series of large male heads. In each case, a simple traditional motif provided Frink with a vehicle for saying something very personal. The horse sculptures are commentaries, not merely upon a particular theme or subject, but upon the nature of the world as she saw it - one in which there is a genuine interdependence between man and domestic animals, but where animals have their own personalities'.

The present work is the last equestrian sculpture that the artist made before her death and is related to the large sculpture (106 in. long) War Horse from 1991.