Houghton Hall are presenting a major exhibition of sculpture by the celebrated post-war British artist Lynn Chadwick CBE (1914–2003). Spanning four decades of the artist’s career, from the 1950s to the 1990s, this new presentation showcases previously unseen and rarely exhibited works alongside his best-known sculptures across the house and grounds of Houghton Hall. It forms the largest exhibition of Chadwick’s work in the UK in more than two decades, following the artist’s death and the retrospective at Tate Britain’s Duveen Galleries in 2003.
Curated by Pangolin London, the exhibition presents 30 works across multiple exterior and interior sites at Houghton Hall, including early works, a powerful group of dynamic beasts, kinetic sculptures, and a selection of Chadwick’s best-known paired figures (‘couples’), all set in dialogue with the Neo-Palladian architecture and extensive parklands of Houghton Hall.
About the Artist: Chadwick came to sculpture through unconventional means, initially training and working as an architectural draughtsman before turning to mobile constructions for trade fairs. The success of these early mobiles and free-standing sculptures, two of which were shown at the Festival of Britain in London in 1951, encouraged him to pursue sculpture full time.
Unlike many of his contemporaries, Chadwick’s practice was rooted in construction rather than modelling. Working primarily in bronze, he moved from kinetic mobiles in the late 1940s to the iconic angular figures — often paired and drawn from human and animal forms — from the 1950s onwards. He began by welding an iron armature, or ‘space frame’, which he then filled with Stolit, a man-made stone composed of gypsum and iron filings, building up the surface into a solid form.
Starting from abstraction and gradually giving his figures a strong sense of life and movement, Chadwick’s process reversed traditional sculptural methods. The result is a body of work marked by tension, attitude, and rich surface textures.
Chadwick came to international prominence in 1952, when he was included in the British Council’s New Aspects of British Sculpture exhibition at the XXVI Venice Biennale. In 1956, he returned to the British Pavilion, where he won the International Prize for Sculpture, beating Alberto Giacometti. He remains the youngest sculptor ever to receive the award.
Chadwick went on to secure an international reputation, with works in many of the great public collections of Europe, North and South America, and Japan. Many honours and awards also followed, including a CBE in 1964 and election as a Royal Academician in 2001.
Seventy years on, this anniversary offers a timely moment to revisit Chadwick’s pivotal role in the history of post-war British sculpture.
The Lynn Chadwick exhibition runs until 4 October.
Text courtesy of Houghton Hall
Photographs Selwyn Taylor