Barry Flanagan

Waddington Galleries, London, October 1990
Given by the artist to the present owner

The work is intentionally pitted and dirt has gathered in some of the crevices. The sculpture is in good original condition. The hare detaches from the pyramid. There are two arrows, one on the underside of the hare, and one on the top of the pyramid, which mark out the direction in which the hare should face. Please telephone the department on 020 7293 5381 if you have any questions regarding the present work.
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Conceived in 1990, the present work is unique.

After two decades of abstract work, Barry Flanagan began to use the hare as a subject in 1979. Within three years he was exhibiting a selection of large leaping hare sculptures as the British representative at the 1982 Venice Biennale. It is easy to see the artist's transition from non-objective to objective subject matter as a sudden divergence, an about turn in progression. But whilst the hare itself can not be called abstract, it is a recognisable creature, its symbolism is unfixable, and it is this refusal to be pinned down which has caused the hare to remain a rich subject matter for Flanagan for so long. It is an animal that holds many strains of contradictory meaning for different cultures: lunar symbolism, androgyny, masculinity, femininity, sexuality and purity to name but a few.

The sculptor described the way in which he chanced on the subject.

I had been invited over to the A & A Foundry in 1978 or 1979. I occasionally bumped into Andy Elton and he'd say 'Come on over, come and work for us.'... I needed a subject, so I asked my local butcher for his slaughter – and he had this hare. I took it to the foundry and modelled the hare leaping, life-size on the bench. So that was a sort of emblematic use of the hare. (Conversations between Barry Flanagan and Hans Ulrich Obrist, November 2005 to February 2006 in Enrique Juncosa (ed.), Barry Flanagan: Sculpture 1965-2005, Ireland, 2006, p.64).

In the present work, the hare leaps over an inanimate mound. It does not produce the same impact as the hare leaping over a bell, or a computer, or an anvil. The mound is more reminiscent of Flanagan's 1960s works such as One Camion Sand Piece, in which the artist exhibited a mound of sand in the open air, than a man-made object. The pitted bronze builds from the ground into a point where it reaches the hare. It is a weighty pile of substance which the acrobatic hare leaps over, a contrast of heavy and static with lithe and mobile, yet all cast in the same matter, the artist's material, bronze. It reverberates with Flanagan's opinion that 'One merely causes things to reveal themselves to the sculptural awareness.'