Playfully co-opting the language of classical figurative sculpture, Thomas Houseago’s rigorously conceptual practice radically redefines the significance of three-dimensional art in contemporary culture. The artist’s sculptural work subverts art historical tropes of figuration, while redefining the viewer’s expectations and interactions with sculpture, and skillfully renegotiating art’s hierarchies. Executed in 2014, Standing Figure (Cyclops) offers all the hallmarks of the artist’s most important work.

Rendered on a monumental scale, there is a fantastically coarse and crude quality to Standing Figure (Cyclops). With its bulky and cumbrous form and incongruous angular limbs, the work stands as the antipode to the delicate, elegant almost limp figures that populate the history of figurative sculpture. Houseago’s intentionally clumsy forms undermine the imperious and enduring qualities of traditional bronze. Standing Figure (Cyclops) masterfully appropriates the tropes of classical sculpture: rendered in white patina reminiscent of marble, the figure stands upon an imposing plinth, and adopts the ancient sculptural convention of the contrapposto. Undoubtably, the artist positions himself within the very canon he so dexterously subverts. Beyond classical sculpture Houseago quotes from a great multitude of modern artists from the bulky mammoth bodies of Eduardo Paolozzi’s sculpture, to Henry Moore’s biomorphic forms. Indeed, the mask-like face of Standing Figure (Cyclops) calls to mind the cubist figures in Pablo Picasso’s infamous Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.

Oscillating between the two dimensional and three-dimensional realms, Houseago renegotiates conventional hierarchies in art practices. There is a monumentality and distinct physicality associated with Houseago’s use of bronze; both physically strengthening the vulnerabilities of the plaster maquette they are based on and complicating with existing hierarchies in art practices to elevate the plaster model to a more prestigious state. Yet, Standing Figure (Cyclops) retains the aesthetic of its plaster origins; the process of artistic creation is laid bare, and the figure is polluted with the tracings of its own making. The hand of the artist remains wholly visible and indeed takes centre stage. Denying the polished, finished aesthetic of conventional sculpture, there is an immediacy and spontaneity to the present work evocative of the artist’s working sketches.

It is Houseago’s fluency in art historical references and disregard for the hierarchies of artistic processes that so effectively rattles and complicates the viewer’s interaction with his work. Houseago toys with our expectations of conventional representation of the human form; his sculptures are fantastical anthropomorphic beasts as much as they are human figures. Executed on a monumental scale, Standing Figure (Cyclops) towers above the viewer, it’s spectacularly disproportionate and distorted body and wide staring eyes confronting the viewer with all it’s wonderful strangeness. Taking the human figure as his primary subject, Houseago probes at the interaction between viewer and artwork through primal human identification and the power of natural instinct. In a 2010 lecture, the artist perfectly elucidated the power of the human form as a motif: “I’m just really interested in how (…) the body appears. What it’s like to look and live with human beings. I’m fascinated by that. And how you can express that” (Thomas Houseago, ‘The Public Art Fund Lecture at the New School’, 2010, online).