by Wakefield is at the center of sculpture in Britain. Take a trip to the birthplace of Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth and you enter the realms of three-dimensional art: 10 gracious galleries of carvings and projections by these artists alongside many European masterpieces at the Hepworth Wakefield; stone sculptures all through the green pastures of the nearby Yorkshire Sculpture Park; many buses to the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds.
In addition, an ever-changing program of new shows highlights the sculpture to such an extent that anyone who wants to engage with this art, specifically over the last 100 years, will be at its most concentrated. in these few square miles of Yorkshire. .
One of the most anticipated sculpture shows this year, for example, brings together the works of the Jamaican-born artist. Ronald Moody (1900-84) first in full force at the Hepworth Wakefield. Small portrait heads in wood and bronze of giants such as Paul Robeson and Harold Moody, the artist’s brother, founder of the League of Colored People, are concentrated personalities. Hierarchical figures in stone and oak connect the ancient past with Moody’s presence in a haunting visual poetry.
His art covers the 20th century, from the Caribbean island where he was born to London, with a turn in the 30s in Modern Paris, always with a firm and vital verification. The show opens with a philosophical vision: a two-sided human head, encased in a suit surrounding the form of a snake that rests on an animal’s paw and curls up into a bird’s beak. Atavistic, but clearly modern in its fiberglass resin, is the title of the work Man… A Universe.
Moody worked in wood from the 1920s onwards to captivating effect, using the grain to introduce rippling movement into the female form. Some figures, all titles Annie, they seem to exist in dappled light, or even underwater currents. The heads are often slightly tilted, with the most delicate inflection of the eye and tip to show an attitude of joy.
Curvaceous and muscular, short and sturdy, these figures are all compressed strength, even when small enough to pick up by the neck. Moody’s little niece’s glorious head is not much bigger than an infant’s fist, and her lively personality is evident. Not much more than a man with an inner smile, arms firmly at his hardwood sides, with nothing more than a sarong: Moody incarnation of priests.
There are Caribbean deities: witty and quixotic critters in bronze. This is Savacou, a mythological bird in charge of wind and thunder, which will later turn into a star, its head is wonderfully onomatopoeic: a shape like a very squawk sound. A colossal 7-foot version of Moody, cast in aluminium, still stands outside the University of the West Indies at Mona, which shares its name with the Caribbean Artists Movement magazine of the 1970s, edited by Edward Kamau Brathwaite.
Related: Dentist, modernist, activist: the many lives of sculptor Ronald Moody
Perhaps the most universal, indeed ecumenical, of all the statues here is the towering Moody. Johanan of 1936 (purchased by the Tate almost 60 years later). Apparently named after John the Baptist, this elm torso is curiously androgynous, swollen and arched and shot through with the glimmer contours of the wood. The face is an inscrutable pharaonic expression, the body something of a beatific Buddha. Moody visited the British Museum in 1928, five years after arriving in England (initially to train as a dentist), and was moved, as he put it, by “the immense inner force…the an irreversible movement in tranquility” he found there. That is precisely what his best works have.
If this show is at times difficult to identify Moody among his many influences and peers – objects from the British Museum, various artworks by other CAM members – it is well worth the slow scrutiny. and carefully. Moody’s art is powerfully benign, and the Hepworth Wakefield brings his humanity, in all its forms, forcefully back into view.
A parallel show with the artist from South Africa Igshan Adams, in the nearby galleries, has as much soul and even more beauty. Adams (born 1982) takes a tapestry and transforms it into clouds, landscapes, rhythmic interweaving, even human beings. He is the most magical and inventive of the textile artists working today.
An open warp, in a silvery string, sparkles with a time of shiny beads, pearls, shells and stone chips to take you straight into oblivion. A cascade of nylon rope, tiny dark elements caught in it, suggests a crisis and a waterfall. An extremely complex structure of lace, cotton thread, fine chains and tiny jewels, hanging and body off the wall, folds and curves and seems to open its two limbs wide. Ouma – grandmother – is called.
You look at, and in, every great motor and web. As you float above, across the gallery, hang clouds of dust and flecks that look like feathers but are just as important as a Meteor shower. Danger and memory are trapped within their vast invention, from fuse wire and lamp filaments, shower heads and silk threads, sharp clips and plastic ties. They retain color and form as vaguely as actual clouds but are spun out of Adams’s imagination and intellect, his living dreams.
At Yorkshire Sculpture Park, a few miles away, the British-Indian artist Bharti Kher (born 1969) has installed giant porcelain figurines across the landscape – or so it seems. These strange goddesses are bronze casts of broken clay objects, reconfigured in new ways. A girl turns into a woman, 23 children’s heads emerge from a mother goddess and a female musician turns into her own tambourine. Late-flowering surrealism meets Asian tradition.
In the underground galleries, a solemn chamber of ultramarine bricks encloses the audience. Deaf Room made of 10 tonnes of glass bangles, commemorating the infamous Gujarat riots of 2002, where more than 1,000 people died, and women were raped and burnt. Bloss white bindis across broken mirrors like ice flowers i Milk Teeth and a monolith of old radiators, entitled The hot winds that blow from the West, like a pile of bleached bones: look twice, think again, be careful.
Kher’s hybrid art goes to antler women, cow-headed goddesses, and baboon-faced self-portraits. We are mythical beings, always part animal. Everything has its background – the crashed ambulance she came across near her studio in London, crushed; the saris her mother sold in Streatham, now painted with resin and draped like molten glass, in one case completely hiding the figure below, a reference to assassinated Pakistani leader Benazir Bhutto.
Sometimes the intimation is clear, and lyrical; at other times, as with Cloud Walker, which refers to the Dakini dancers of Tibetan mythology, is completely opaque. But when form and content come together perfectly, there is no need for texts. The thin red line that runs the entire length of the YSP galleries, right above your head, is glowing in the sunlight of the day. It is an artery of glass bangles: a beautiful female bloodline.
Star ratings (out of five)
Ronald Moody: A Sculpture Life ★★★★
Igshan Adams: Weerhoud ★★★★★
Bharti Kher: Alchemy ★★★
