Programme highlights
2014-2015
Henry Moore Institute
The Headrow
Leeds LS1 3AH
www.henry-moore.org/hmi
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The Henry Moore Institute is a centre for the study of sculpture. Our 2014 exhibition programme features a series of exhibitions addressing relationships between sculpture and the model, drawing, photography and the event.
Spring
Vladimir and Georgii Stenberg: Construction for a Spatial Structure VI (KPS6, 1919/73)
Trained engineers, the Stenberg brothers (1899–1982/1900–33) were central to the Russian Constructivist movement. Their achievements included designing theatre sets, women’s shoes, film posters and May Day decorations for Moscow’s Red Square. This display presents a 1973 reconstruction of a lost 1919 sculptural prototype for a building alongside archival material tracing this sculpture’s remaking and original showing at Moscow’s Kafe Poetov in January 1922.
Ian Kiaer: Tooth House
Ian Kiaer (b. 1971) repurposes discarded and humble materials, such as packing foam, chocolate wrappers and standard-sized sheets of paper. His weightless, materially worthless objects address idealistic proposals for observing and structuring the world. Tooth House explores the model through a series of works made between 2005 and 2014. The model draws on scale, material and encounter—key terms for the study of sculpture. Tooth House names the exhibition and a series of works made for the Institute’s galleries, and is taken from the work of visionary architect Frederick Kiesler (1890–1965). The exhibition travels to Focal Point Gallery in the summer, focusing on works made in 2013–14.
Photographing Sculpture: How the Image Moves the Object
Photography has made sculpture mobile since the birth of the medium. Presenting over eighty vintage prints from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth century, Photographing Sculpture studies the ways photographs ‘move’ objects, whether activating them visually, transporting them by proxy or documenting their travels across space and time. The selection is drawn entirely from the Henry Moore Institute Archive of Sculptors’ Papers.
Summer
D’Arcy Thompson’s On Growth and Form
In 1917, the mathematical biologist, zoologist and Classics scholar D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson (1860–1948) published On Growth and Form, a poetic and mathematical study of scale, gravity, order and process. This book has lodged itself within the consciousness of twentieth-century sculpture. Henry Moore turned to Thompson’s work while studying in Leeds in 1919 and Richard Hamilton took the title for his 1951 landmark exhibition at London’s ICA. This exhibition presents a selection of Thompson’s teaching models, held in the collection of the D’Arcy Thompson Zoology Museum at the University of Dundee, alongside 1917 and 1942 editions of On Growth and Form and four ‘Transformation’ drawings made by Henry Moore in the 1930s.
Gego. Line as Object
Gego (1912–94) faithfully explored the possibilities of the line. Born Gertrud Goldschmidt in Hamburg in 1912, she emigrated to Caracas in 1939 immediately after finishing her architectural studies in Stuttgart. In Venezuela she began working as an artist in the 1950s expanding the line into planes, volumes and expansive nets to reflect on the nature of perception. Gego. Line as Object investigates the artist’s unrivalled engagement with the problems of form and space, using light, shadow, scale and gravity in a constant process of discovery. This collaboration between the Henry Moore Institute, Hamburger Kunsthalle and Kunstmuseum Stuttgart underlines Gego’s visionary approach to sculpture, spanning 1957 to 1989.
Autumn
The Event Sculpture
Exploring how artists employ live, fleeting formats to challenge assumptions of what, when and where sculpture can be, The Event Sculpture addresses key sculptural problems. Including films, performances and momentary proposals, the exhibition presents nine public events by nine artists on the outside of the Institute’s building, turning the façade into a vertical plinth, before each work moves into the gallery spaces. Asking how sculptures that are transitory can be written into art history, The Event Sculpture embraces the format of the event, asking how it can contribute to and enrich understandings of sculpture.
Dorothy Annan & Trevor Tennant
Dorothy Annan (1908–83) and Trevor Tennant (1908–80) were a couple whose intertwined artistic practice reflects developments in British sculpture during the 1950s and ’60s. A celebrated muralist and painter, Annan is widely recognised for her public commissions, especially her ceramic tile mural for the Fleet Building, London’s largest telephone exchange. Trevor Tennant was an active teacher, and his works were included in the influential group exhibitions Sculpture in the Home in the 1950s and ’60s. Bringing together sketchbooks, exhibition catalogues and photographs, the exhibition chronologically charts the artists’ sculptural practices, celebrating the 2013 gift of this material to the Henry Moore Institute Archive of Sculptors’ Papers.
The Henry Moore Institute is a part of The Henry Moore Foundation, which was set up by Moore in 1977 to encourage appreciation of the visual arts, especially sculpture. An award-winning exhibitions venue, research centre, library and sculpture archive, the Institute hosts a year-round programme of exhibitions, conferences and lectures, as well as developing research and publications, to expand the scholarship of historical and contemporary sculpture.
