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Lot Essay
‘At first I gave the rectangular heads to both genders. Then I thought, that’s not quite fair – I ought to give the female one a different head. I made the female head a pyramid so that the tip of the pyramid was just slightly higher than the male one, but the mass of the female one was slightly lower than the head of the male, so as to balance it not only from the point of view of gender but from the point of view of masses.'
Lynn Chadwick
This balance of mass was fundamental to Chadwick. Indeed, within his works there lies a series of balancing idioms, with the artist playing with the parameters of mass and space; angular and organic forms; and the naturalistic and abstract. Chadwick explained the importance of such practice, ‘In the mobiles you have the arm, and you balance two things on it like scales – you have a weight at one end and an object at the other end. If you have a heavy weight close to the fulcrum then you can have a light thing at the other end. So you can [similarly] balance the visual weight of two objects. And so it was interesting to balance male with female. To me, I was balancing them, I suppose, psychologically, or whatever it was’ (L. Chadwick, quoted in E. Lucie-Smith, Chadwick, Stroud, 1997, p. 98).
We are very grateful to Sarah Marchant for her assistance in preparing this catalogue entry.