Kenneth Armitage, R.A. (1916-2002)
Artist's Resale Right ("Droit de Suite"). Artist's… Read more
Kenneth Armitage, R.A. (1916-2002)

The Visitors

Details
Kenneth Armitage, R.A. (1916-2002)
The Visitors
bronze with a black patina
22½ in. (57.2 cm.) wide
Conceived in 1961.
Provenance
Purchased by the present owner in the 1960s or early 1970s.
Literature
Exhibition catalogue, Kenneth Armitage, London, Marlborough Gallery, 1962, no. 8, illustrated.
T. Woollcombe (ed.), Kenneth Armitage Life and Work, Much Hadham, 1997, p. 144, no. KA95.
Exhibited
New York, Paul Rosenberg & Co., An Exhibition of Recent Sculpture by Kenneth Armitage, March 1962, no. 10, another cast.
London, Marlborough Gallery, Kenneth Armitage, May 1962, no. 8, another cast.
Special notice
Artist's Resale Right ("Droit de Suite"). Artist's Resale Right Regulations 2006 apply to this lot, the buyer agrees to pay us an amount equal to the resale royalty provided for in those Regulations, and we undertake to the buyer to pay such amount to the artist's collection agent. VAT rate of 5% is payable on hammer price and at 20% on the buyer's premium.

Brought to you by

André Zlattinger
André Zlattinger

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Lot Essay

The present work is an early sculpture from a series of works that the artist began to develop in the 1960s. For much of this decade Kenneth Armitage was concerned with the theme of grouping figures into a single form. Armitage talks about his work in the following statement 'I wanted to merge them (the figures) so completely they formed a new organic unit - a simple mass of whatever shape I liked containing only that number of heads, limbs or other detail I felt necessary. So in a crowd we see only the face or hand that catches our eye, for we don't see mathematically but only what is most conspicuous or important or familiar' (Kenneth Armitage's statement in P. Selz, New Images of Man, p. 23).

There is another cast of The Visitors in The Kreeger Museum, Washington, D.C.

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