our artists
lynn russell chadwick
“Lynn Chadwick was an English sculptor who produced large-scale, somewhat abstract works in bronze and steel. He was known for his improvisational technique of welding metal without sketches or plans, designing as he manipulated his material. Born in Barnes in London in 1914, Chadwick studied architecture at the Merchant Taylors’ School. He worked as a draughtsman in architecture firms, taking particular interest in the work of Rodney Thomas. After serving as a pilot escorting Atlantic convoys during World War II, he returned to London with a newfound sense of artistic fervor, and began experimenting with small sculptures and mobiles of lightweight materials such as wire, balsa wood and light brass abstract objects.
His first major exhibition of mobiles at the Gimpel Fils gallery launched his career and brought critical attention to his work. In early 1951, the Arts Council of Britain commissioned him to produce a large-scale sculpture for the Festival of Britain; The Fisheater was exhibited at the Tate Gallery through 1952. He represented Britain at the 1956 Venice Biennale where he became the youngest recipient of the International Sculpture Prize. Over time as his scale grew, he expanded his subject matter and experimented with increasingly abstract – though at times clearly biomorphic – forms. His works are featured in major museums around the world including the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Musée Rodin, Paris; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Royal Academy of Arts, London; and many other institutions.”
Bio by Sothebys, 2020
lynn russell chadwick
henry spencer moore
henry spencer moore
“Henry Moore was a major British sculptor whose organically shaped, semiabstract and often monumental bronze and stone figures made him one of the most important sculptors of the 20th century.
Born in into a Yorkshire coal-mining family on 30 July 1898, Moore started training as a schoolteacher, until he was called to serve in World War I and was injured. Thanks to a rehabilitation grant in September 1919, he studied drawing and sculpture at the Leeds School of Art, from which he obtained a scholarship to study sculpture at the Royal College of Art in London. There, he spent time at the British Museum, discovering the power and beauty of Egyptian, Etruscan, pre-Columbian and African sculpture. Reacting against the European sculptural tradition, Moore moved away from the human figure to experiment with abstract shapes that made use of organic and natural forms – he studied bones, pebbles and shells to understand what he called “nature’s principles of form and rhythm.”
From his first one-man exhibition and public commission in London in the late 1920s, to his 1943 commission of a Madonna and Child for the church of St. Matthew in Northampton, to his Reclining Figure, 1956–58, for the UNESCO building in Paris, Moore developed a distinct Modernist sculptural language that earned him international critical acclaim. Along with museums around the world, Moore’s work are in the collections of England’s Chatsworth House, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Kew Gardens and Fitzwilliam Museum.”
Bio by Sothebys, 2020
jose de creeft
“José de Creeft began sculpting at the age of eleven, making small Nativity figures to help support his family. He worked at several artists’ studios in Madrid and Barcelona, including that of an imagier, who made stylized religious figures for churches. When he was sixteen, a group of Eskimos pitched their tents near his home. He was fascinated by their craftsmanship, observing that “with tiny pieces of ivory they made monumental carvings” and as a result, became interested in direct methods of carving. He preferred working directly with wood and stone, and in 1927 created over two hundred stone carvings for a fort on the island of Mallorca. Eighteen months later, he moved to America and settled in New York. Although he primarily worked with marble, wood, and terra-cotta, de Creeft also experimented with a wide variety of other materials, including stovepipes, oil cans, insulated wire, and rubber tubes.”
Bio by National Museum of American Art (CD-ROM) (New York and Washington D.C.: MacMillan Digital in cooperation with the National Museum of American Art, 1996)
jose de creeft
phiilippe hiquily
philippe hiquily
“The French modernist sculptor, Philippe Hiquily, worked for a full decade creating abstract figurative sculpture before turning his attention in 1960 to making furniture from his favorite sculptural material: metal. Interestingly, the shift followed closely on the heels of a major honor which cemented his artistic prominence: in 1959 he won the prestigious Critic's Prize for sculpture at the Paris Biennial. Although in the abstract, the concept of designing chairs and desks and tables would appear to be a radical departure from the creation of non-utilitarian sculpture, it was not - in Hiquily's case. His furniture is an extension of his work in sculpture. In fact, Hiquily's choice to create furniture in an ambitious way ended up informing his later, even more technically challenging sculptural efforts.
His seats and surfaces, where he intends for people to share food and drink, and perform their intellectual work, carry with them all of the artist's sculptural preoccupations and enthusiasms. His mobiliers are every bit as beautifully crafted, and as overtly erotic, as his sculptures which take as their point of departure, almost without fail, the human (female) body in sexually ecstatic positions. As one writer noted, Hiquily's furniture is "dream-like and surrealist in spirit."
Bio from AskArt, "Philippe Hiquily," Magen H Gallery, Web, Jan. 2017
manuel neri
“Manuel Neri is an American artist best known for his uniquely painterly figurative sculpture. A member of the “second generation” of Bay Area Figurative Movement, Neri was a prominent figure in the San Francisco art scene for many years. Born on April 12, 1930 in Sanger, CA, he attended the California School of Fine Arts where he studied under Richard Diebenkorn and Elmer Nelson Bischoff. Initially working with junk materials such as wire and cardboard, Neri moved towards figurative sculpture crafted mainly in plaster.
His primary subjects are life-sized women applied with brightly-colored paint, often texturing the surfaces of his sculptures with scratches and gouges. He went on to marry another member of the second generation of the Bay Area Figurative Movement, the painter Joan Brown. Neri was honored by the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1984, and was the recipient of a lifetime achievement award from the International Sculpture Center in 2006. His work is included in numerous public collections, such as the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the Seattle Art Museum.”
Bio by Artnet, 2021.
manuel neri
kamran fallahpour
kamran fallahpour
Kamran Fallahpour, PhD, is an Iranian-born American artist and neuroscientist living and working in NYC. He works in various artistic media with a focus on sculpture. His art explores the fragility of human nature, resilience, stillness, and transcendence. Reduced to their most basic and minimal form, his stylized sculpted figures convey subtle yet powerful expressions that hint at an underlying range of deep emotion. Fallahpour often works with plaster, applying it to steel rods and frames, an artistic process that brings a spontaneity to his vision, a sense of immediacy as he creates a work before the plaster dries. His finished pieces are inspired in the moment by this dynamic artistic process, by the tactile sensation of the plaster, and give rise to forms that explore what it means to perceive.
Fallahpour’s interest and training in neuroscience and psychology adds an additional layer to his work as he incorporates the latest findings in brain science, and ponders the plasticity of our perception and the realities we construct. Central to his artistic vision is the way an artist changes his medium to create art – and how, in turn, the finished art changes the creator, and the viewer. Fallahpour’s work is informed by sculptors Alberto Giacometti, Henry Moore, and Hans Josephsohn, as well as minimalist and contemporary movements in art. However, his sculptures retain a distinctive quality, a unique sensibility, one of ephemeral humanity.
“My main problem, my dream, my proposition, which may be too ambitious, would be of suggesting forms rather than making them. I believe that human form has had the leading part all along the history of sculpture, since sculpture was born” - Mario Negri
mario negri
Mario Negri was born in 1916 in Tirano, in the province of Sondrio. After graduating from the Fine Arts Academy in Brera, he goes on to attend a two year course in architecture at the polytechnic of Milan, where he comes into contact with the group of artists and intellectuals that gravitate around the publication and becomes friends with Sandro Cherchi, Italo Valenti and Giacomo Manzù. Called up in 1940, on the 9th September 1943 he is captured by the Germans at Bressanone. He is deported to the Prisoner of War Camps in Germany and Poland (Deblin-Irena, Oberlangen, Bremervorde, Wietzendorf), and isn’t liberated until 1945. In the immediate post war years, he dedicates himself full-time to sculpture and forms an intense relationship with MAF, one of the oldest art foundries in Lombardy. From 1950 alongside being an artist he becomes a critic: and a collaborator on the architecture and decorative arts publication founded by Gio Ponti in 1928. The following year he marries Elda Magri, a graduate of piano from the Milan Conservatory. There are three daughters from the marriage, Chiara, Marina and Maria Laura. Towards the end of the 1950s he opens his first important solo exhibition in Italy (Galleria del Milione in Milan in 1957) and abroad (the Grace Borgenicht Gallery in New York in 1958). During these years he establishes and consolidates more intense human and cultural relationships that are long-lasting and incisive, with Alberto Giacometti, Serafino Corbetta, Cesare Gnudi, Franco Russoli, Luigi Carluccio, Mario Valsecchi, Lamberto Vitali, the young sculptor RudyWach, the collector Han Coray, the painter Edmondo Dobrzanski, the jewellery creator Karl-Heinz Reister and the photographers Paolo Monti and Arno Hammmacher.
Together with the architect Mario Tedeschi he curates the “Sculpture in Architecture” exhibition in Sydney. From the 1960s he establishes his studio in Milan in Via Stoppani and undertakes an intense activity of exhibitions in Italy and abroad. He also produces some major public works, such as Eindhoven Square in The Netherlands, in collaboration with Gio Ponti (1967) and Grande Colonna di Robbia in Poschiavio in Grigione (1970). He holds numerous prestigious roles: member of the consultative artistic commission of the Fine Arts and Permanent Exhibition society of Milan (1974), National Academic of San Luca (1979), member of the Académie Royale des Sciences, des Lettres et des Beaux-arts de Belgique in Brussels (1984), honorary member of the Accademia Linguistica di Belle Arte in Genova (1987). He dies unexpectedly of a heart attack on the 5th April 1987 in Tirano.