Geoffrey Clarke b.1924
Head, c.1952
welded steel on stone base
5 H ins


Provenance
Nancy Balfour



This moulded iron head dates from 1952, the same remarkable year in which Clarke, only recently graduated from the Royal College of Art (in Stained Glass, Engraving and Iron Sculpture), was commissioned to make three of the ten stained glass windows for the nave of the new Coventry Cathedral, was included along with seven others in the famous Young British Sculptors exhibition at the Venice Biennale (Butler, Chadwick, Paolozzi and Turnbull among them) and had his first one-man show at the influential Gimpel Fils Gallery. Originally working with the less flexible process of forged iron, Clarke had only taken up welding iron a couple of years earlier on a training course at British Oxygen and had found it a far more suitable technique through which to develop his new sculptural ideas. These ideas had first been developed in etchings and aquatints from 1950-52 where, inspired by Klee, Picasso’s iron sculpture and a series of botanical drawings of germinating seeds seen in the Natural History Museum, he had evolved a more abstract style to express his preferred theme of Man and his relationship to Nature. In this work, for example, the features of eye, nose and mouth appear to grow from the main structure - the skull - like buds or stalks emerging from a seedpod, while having something also of an insect’s antennae about them.