‘In 1979 Flanagan bought a hare from a local butcher and took it to the foundry. He drew round it using its blood and noted on the drawing, “They said the hare weighed the equivalent of seven pheasants and was unusually heavy.” He modelled it, made a mould and cast it. The first leaping hare was born. From this mould he made, in plaster, leaping hare, embellished, 2/3 jan ’80 (1980). Flanagan described how he gilded the hare on the first full moon of the year, abiding by a Chinese legend that a full moon and a lake are conductive to the laying of gold. In Chinese culture the hare lives on the moon, like the man on the moon in the West. Flanagan drew from deeply embedded cultural iconography and tapped the growing interest in Shamanism to find new solutions to the continuing and fundamental question where such ideas come from and, like March hare folklore, combines the ultimate paradox in the unpredictable flow of experience.’
J. Melvin, ‘Barry Flanagan: An Itinerant Sculptor’, in Barry Flanagan, London: Waddington Custot, 2017, p. 10
‘It is often assumed that his adoption of the traditional process of bronze casting signalled an abandonment of avant-garde practice. However, what it actually reveals is a deeper continuity running beneath a changing surface; a continuity based on his engagement with certain contradictions that have remained constant throughout a career marked by an intense search for a practise that answers the aporias and contradictions involved in making sculpture.’
C. Wallis, ‘The business is in the making’, in Barry Flanagan: Early Works 1965–1982, exh. cat., London: Tate Britain, 2011, p. 11
‘Thematically the choice of the hare is really quite a rich and expressive sort of model; ... the investment of human attributes into the animal world is a very well practised device, in literature and film etcetera and is really quite poignant. And on a practiucal level, if you consider what conveys situation and meaning and feeling in a human figure, the range of expression is in fact far more limited than the device of investing an animal – a hare especially – with the expressive attributes of a human being. The ears, for instance, are really able to convey far more than a squint in an eye of a figure, or a grimace on the face of a model.’
B. Flanagan in conversation with Judith Bumpus, quoted in Barry Flanagan: Recent Sculpture, exh. cat., New York: Pace Gallery, 1994, p. 5
‘In 1979, the exhibition The horses of San Marco opened at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. This show made a profound impression of Flanagan. He described how the sheer tactile physicality of the ancient modelled horses created an impressive aura and majesty and he referred to them as "the best model” to demonstrate man’s relation with the animal as much as the desire and means to represent it. The varied patinas and gilding also provided substantial material to investigate the properties of bronze and the exhibition catalogue included essays on ancient casting methods, gilding in the Greek and Roman eras and an investigation of the foundry techniques used to cast them. Flanagan decided to recreate the horse and, by so doing, to claim it for his own.’
J. Melvin, ‘Barry Flanagan: An Itinerant Sculptor’, in Barry Flanagan, London: Waddington Custot, 2017, p. 10
‘If his first works broke with tradition, these later ones attack the new tradition represented by contemporary art that justifies itself by the style or technique used. We find them boxing, dancing, playing the drum or even playing with lingerie. When they are jumping, their most emblematic image, they are converted into emblems of freedom, jumping above the symbolic objects of the great religions – crosses and crescents – and symbols of human endeavour, like bells and helmets or anvils representing the force of gravity. Flanagan’s hares inhabit a world outside a type of bourgeois prestige which is based on logic, thought, morality and functionality.’
E. Juncosa and B. Dawson, ‘Directors’ Foreword’, in Barry Flanagan: Sculpture 1965–2005, exh. cat., Dublin: Irish Museum of Modern Art, 2006, p. 52
‘On a visit to the marble quarries in northern Italy, Flanagan turned out to be an enthusiastic hunter of fossil stones, in which he recognised the same inherent visual qualities as in his soft organic materials. According to Flanagan, the poetry of these fossil stones lays after all in the fact that it was already there, but only had to be brought out by a gentle hand and entirely in conformance with its particular character. It is in this gentle and responsible spirit that he set to work on his early Stone Carvings.’
T. Verhoeven, ‘An Unpredictable Responsibility. On Barry Flanagan’s intuitive anecdotalism’, in Barry Flanagan, exh. cat., Ghent: Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, 2005, n.p.
‘Sheet steel is after all perfect for the sort of “origami” Flanagan had in mind, in which, by simply folding the material, he removed the boundary between the second and third dimensions.’
T. Verhoeven, ‘An Unpredictable Responsibility. On Barry Flanagan’s intuitive anecdotalism’, in Barry Flanagan, exh. cat., Ghent: Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, 2005, n.p.
‘Flanagan‘s approaches to the making of stone carvings may be differentiated by procedure and spirit. In the first place there is the working from found quarry-stone fragments, arbitrarily selected for something about them that appeals to the sculptural awareness. In these, what Flanagan has called the “geography” (shape, surface, contour) of the stone is slightly modified by chisel, and incised with markings and motifs. Such modifications of found rocks and stones with incised signs – lines, spirals, cups and rings – have an ancient history. Hard stone, natural and enduring (whose surfaces are a visible record of immeasurable time, geological forces and surface weathers) is symbolically inscribed, turned by transient human agency – craft and art – to some mysterious or enigmatic human purpose. [...]
To intensify our own encounter with them, Flanagan‘s incised quarry-stone works are sometimes presented on a robust ceremonial wooden base. Thus elevated, they are “honourable objects” with an honourable purpose: to bring an awareness of time in all its dimensions into space/light – the arena of visibility.’
M. Gooding, ‘First Catch Your Hare: An Essaying in Four Unequal Parts and a Coda, with a Salutation’, in Barry Flanagan, London: Waddington Custot, 2017, pp. 22–23
‘Flanagan made a name for himself very quickly with works that remain vivid in the memory. They were original, striking, witty, surprising and distinctive in character. They were considered at the time (more or less) to be Zen, Dada, biomorphic and to be testing the limits of a medium.’
M. Compton, ‘A Developing Practice’, in Barry Flanagan, exh. cat., London: The British Council, 1982, p. 17
‘Many of the sculptures that were made with sticks or poles and with some kind of cloth have both a tattered look, with deliberately ragged edges, and have reference to the human activities of building. Some, for instance, are made into a wigwam shape. Others are constructed by repeated layers placed cross-wise.
These were the first occasions that Flanagan “built” sculpture; and we cannot think of the pieces as purely abstract works.’
T. Hilton, ‘Less A Slave of Other People’s Thinking…’, in Barry Flanagan: Sculpture, exh. cat., London: The British Council, 1982, p. 10
‘Flanagan’s works on paper do not represent a collection of ideas, no sample of virtual sculptures or projected room installations. As he himself says, he prefers to work directly with the sculptural material and improvise in space, rather than be compelled to follow a maquette. “There are different types of drawing but all illustrate the appropriateness of certain sorts of drawing for certain sorts of activities.”’
H-J. Schwalm, ‘When Hares Can Dance and Balance’, in Barry Flanagan: Sculpture and Drawing, exh. cat., Musée d’Art modern et d’Art contemporain, Nice; Bielefeld: Kerber Verlag, 2002, p. 33
‘In sand girl, 1970 Flanagan filmed sand falling onto and around a naked woman. There are brief glimpses of the studio’s industrial interior and a fleeting shot through the window to the roofs beyond, but the focus remains on the pouring sand as it creates contours and mounds and, like the drawing on the beach, as it presents sculpting in action. Sand, by feel and association, is malleable and when, towards the end of the film, the woman rises, the camera tracks the imprint of her body, relating to a moment that is similar to the removal of a cast object from a mould.’
J. Melvin, ‘No thing to say’, in Barry Flanagan: Early Works: 1965–1982, exh. cat., London: Tate Britain, 2011, p. 58
‘Flanagan was preoccupied by canvas: wall-mounting it, stretching or hanging it or leaning it against a wall or in a corner, or balanced with sticks fixed to the floor with plasticine to prevent slipping. An examination of his various uses of knots and threads can continue from the bags to the hanging canvas pieces.’
J. Melvin, ‘No thing to say’, in Barry Flanagan: Early Works: 1965–1982, exh. cat., London: Tate Britain, 2011, p. 59
‘For Flanagan the activity of making sculpture was an extension of our three-dimensional experience of the world. Although his work is primarily visual, orchestrating ways to demonstrate the sensual and the tactile with surface, colour, weight and balance, sound and light were as much part of his sculptural vocabulary as material objects.’
J. Melvin, ‘Barry Flanagan – Imaginary Solutions’, in Barry Flanagan: The Hare is Metaphor, exh. cat., New York: Paul Kasmin Gallery, 2018, p. 15
‘If one had to name the first characteristic of Barry Flanagan’s sculpture it would surely be his respect for the many material he uses. Indeed, there have been Flanagan pieces that, because of the strange and inventive modesty of their author, seem to exist only as material – as sand, or flax, or stone – and not to have been shaped by the artist’s hand, only chosen by it. And if sculptors are by tradition men who take an active and manipulative attitude to the world then Flanagan is (as of course we know) no traditional sculptor. He is meditative, rather, a man who notes what he has seen: an artist who touches things lightly, to keep them new and allow them their own eloquence.’
T. Hilton, ‘Less a Slave of Other People’s Thinking...’, in Barry Flanagan, exh. cat., London: The British Council, 1982, p. 7
‘Flanagan was never greatly interested in theory, but instead created by way of an openness to sculptural processes and materials themselves. He considered the fundamental role of the sculptor to be to express himself in a three-dimensional way while holding on to the notion of doubt and enquiry; and his early investigations of form, as revealed through the inherent qualities of materials, highlight how his enquiries into the nature of sculpture combined with an ambition to explore the physical world. If the work seemed removed from “traditional” sculptural activity, it nevertheless remained firmly engaged with a critique of sculpture, asking viewers to rethink their assumptions about space, form and materials.’
C. Wallis, ‘The business is in the making’, in Barry Flanagan: Early Works 1965–1982, London: Tate Britain, 2011, p. 17
‘Drawing was a consistent part of Flanagan’s practice, and in the 1960s this revolved around explorations of additive mark making that included blots, smudges, greasy spots, folding and tearing as much as different qualities of line and material, such as crayon, pencil and ink applied by brush or pen.’
A. Wilson, ‘Working towards poem’ in Barry Flanagan: Early Works: 1965–1982, exh. cat., London: Tate Britain, 2011, p. 35
‘Barry Flanagan is an artist of remarkable variety. In the name of sculpture he has made columns of sand, screens of sacking, laid burnt sticks on hessian, cut steel, devised furniture, constructed rivers of rope and built wigwams of felt. He has poured, painted, heaped, bundled, piled and stacked, as well as taking on the more traditional techniques of the sculptor, carving and casting. Whatever he makes, though, bears his unmistakable stamp, although what that stamp consists of is almost as hard to say clearly as the titles of some of his earliest works: aaing j gni aa, pdreeoo, fpre su and erpf su. It is as if he were bent on creating an entirely new language of expression, by putting together familiar things in hitherto unheard of combinations.’
D. Ricks and A. Rose, ‘Presentation’, in Barry Flanagan, exh. cat., Barcelona: Fundación “La Caixa”, 1993, p. 15
Moon Gold Hare, 2008; Gendrd I / Gendrd II, 1994; light piece, 1969; and feb ‘66, 1966: photo credit unknown.
Unless otherwise stated:
© The Estate of Barry Flanagan
Courtesy of Plubronze Ltd.