Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice book in great condition. Pages in excellent condition with bright plates. Some discolouration of page edges and cover. No notes or highlighting. See images. Fantastic book.

About the book >.>.> The mystery which is sculpture deepens when it represents not by analogy but directly the living human being. All art is problematic. With sculpture there is the burden of physical presence. Two-dimensional images exist in an aesthetic preserve. We enter into an imaginative engagement with them. Sculpture does not await our decision to engage with art. It confronts us and affronts us. We have to cope with it and it is not easy. When it is in human form the tension between our senses of kinship and alienation becomes acute. In a recent letter John Davies quoted the English playwright Howard Barker who in a poem tell us to ‘refuse to dance’. Davies’s art has always been grave. In his student days he was shocked by what seemed to him then valueless art forms remote from peoples’ experience: Op art kinetic things metal constructions of many sorts. His first one-man show in London’s prestigious Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1972 proved his distance from such things and was an outstanding public success. His direction since then has been a dogged and austere search for the point at which sculpture and humanity can meet with purpose and dignity. He made tiny heads in the 1970s; they were never shown. He remains fascinated by the human face by that ‘other’ which from our earliest days we scrutinize to know our fate. The 1972 exhibition was of life-size figures with very lifelike faces (hair glass eyes) as well as of portraits and semi-portrait heads intensified by masks or other facial devices. The effect was disconcerting and dramatic. Davies’s idiom was then close to all-out naturalism though never the slick verism of Photorealist (LL)