by Phyllida Barlow once said that making sculpture has to be adventurous. “I’m a little out of control,” she said. Almost. Whatever the chaos, she was still in charge. What happens when an artist was scheduled to do a show but is no longer ours to do is the central dilemma that runs through Phyllida Barlow: Unscripted, which has just opened at Hauser & Wirth Somerset. This is the first major survey exhibition of Barlow’s work since her death last March, the feedback she didn’t have.
Curated with the Barlow studio team by former Tate Modern director Frances Morris, the show opens with six statement works from four decades. They are medium-sized pieces that you can easily walk around, soberly installed, to make you connect between Barlow’s oeuvre and the history of art that so easily slipped from his fingers. It’s a bit of a “if you know, you know” arrangement, though, and it’s a shame. Still, it’s a treat to see these important Barlows.
The feeling is more of ‘what would Phyllida do?’ than ‘what Phyllida did next’
There’s Shedmesh, the wooden cube and knotted canvas from 1975 that looks back at 1960s minimalism and arte povera. Object for the Television, from 1994, shows a pair of white rabbit ears on top of an old-school monitor on coasters, a nod to all the other rabbit-obsessed artists (Brâncuși, Miró, Jean Arp, as well as Jeff Koons and Barry Flanagan) and those involved in television, too (Nam June Paik’s Magnet TV comes to mind). Meanwhile, Eva Hesse is right there in the loops and knots of Untitled: Tapecoils 2, from 2011: a wall-mounted bracket consisting of a length of tubing made of tape, similar to the electrical tape that some couriers use to cover their bicycles to make them smaller. attractive to thieves.
In the next large room, things get muddier. The aim here is to – somehow! – addressing Barlow’s specific immersion installations, but without Barlow. This is the thread of her work that most people will be familiar with – the huge mounds and rushes of stuff that occupied ever-larger spaces in such a striking way that it often left critics clamored for a more rigorous vocabulary. The work was “mad”, “madly ambitious”, “impossible”, “quasi-architectural”, “enormous”, “monumental”, “indestructible” and – once – just “wow”.
To avoid copying or parodying Barlow’s installation, Morris used Barlow’s habits – recycling, repairing, creating paths, using the ceiling, blocking the entrance – as her methodology. Pieces are repaired, says Morris, by “slapping the plaster and the paint”. A wall of stained wood panels – part of Folly, Barlow’s installation for the British pavilion at the 2017 Venice Biennale – blocks the entrance. Bumps similar to those in the Arsenale in 2013 hang from the ceiling. Meanwhile, 21 room-high, steak-like arches, first shown in New York in 2012, crowd on the other side.
Despite this attractive curatorial approach, it is still full of Barlow. But it’s more than “what would Phyllida do?” space is one of “the next thing Phyllida did”. I have this sudden urge to remove things. Here’s an artist who made work by drilling and jabbing and prodding and filling and pulling and pouring and letting things crash, just to see how gravity might help. How does anyone else get that moment of stillness, of justice that she would have?
Next to him, the folded cloth sticks, the herd of recklessly painted To Let signs and the marked moons swinging on their inner tube chains are as exciting as ever. But the whole feels glassy-eyed, as if it is not breathing. Outside, in contrast, things are real. The red chairs are spilling out of an outhouse and the William Kentridge esque megaphone sits atop a stem in a corner of the farmyard.
Painting was a skill that Barlow didn’t think she had
Most notably, Prank, Barlow’s last series of sculptures, is for a park in New York in 2023. It is an extremely relaxed and coherent group of works. Seven structures of rusted sheet metal wind up the landscaped slope of Oudolf Field behind the gallery spaces. Each has a blobby white rabbit-like shape, located mid-movement on an edge or corner. They look like children playing.
The show also gives a tantalizing glimpse of Barlow at play. A series of tiny sculptures made during the lockdown, about the size of a human skull or heart, promise to explore a whole life, as do a series of small acrylic paintings on canvas. Painting was a skill that Barlow felt she lacked, but that’s exactly what she planned to use for this show.
In 2017, Barlow returned from Venice – undoubtedly the highlight of any artist’s career – in a state of flux. It wasn’t exactly a crisis, she would later explain. It was just that she had learned so much. She was 72. If only the art world had begun to pay attention decades before it finally was.
• Phyllida Barlow: It is unwritten by Hauser & Wirth Somerset until January 5, 2025.
