Artist's Resale Right applies @ 4%

Aluminium

Measurements inclusive of base

Cast Circa 1970
Edition of 6

Exhibited
Retrospective Memorial Exhibition at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park – Another Cast November 27, 1997 – March 1, 1998


Austin Wright 1911 – 1997
Austin Wright studied Modern Languages at New
College Oxford. A teacher until 1954 he took, aged
44, the advice given by Henry Moore to ‘just get on
with it’. Making up for lost time, Wright was soon
producing work from his ‘chaotic barn’ and exhibiting
with the bright stars of his generation, contributing
in 1955 to ‘Modern Art in Yorkshire’ and the touring
British Council Show ‘Young British Sculptors’. In
1957 he won the Acquisition Prize at the Sao Paulo
Biennale (The Argument) and exhibited at the Holland
Park Sculpture Show. If this was not enough Charles
Sewter, of the Manchester Guardian, said in 1955: ‘It
would not be outrageous, far from it, to claim that
Austin Wright is the most gifted sculptor working
in Britain today’. │ Wright was however ‘diffident,
modest, quick to discount praise’, it was not his way
to seek the limelight and some have suggested this
would have destroyed his ability to produce such
‘sensitive and innocent works’. He loved his garden
and the landscape of North Riding ‘I am no tourist’. It
was then in Yorkshire, after a brief period of making
figures from concrete, Wright discovered in the early
1960s the sculptural potential of aluminum ‘it speaks
out to any form of light in the sky’. During this time
Wright took an interest in plant forms when, as
Gregory Fellow of Sculpture at Leeds University, he
saw botanical electron micrographs. This new insight
informed Austin’s work, which he combined with
his investigation of the pivotal relationship between
human hip and torso – ‘Pomona’ here an example and
‘Main Road’ a more vulnerable, fragile, figuration of a
plant like stretching.