Barry Flanagan was born in North Wales in 1941, and began his art studies at Birmingham College of Art and Crafts (1957-58) before continuing to St Martin’s School of Art, first as a student (1964-66) and then as a teacher (1967-71). Whilst at St Martin’s, he attended Antony Caro’s famed sculpture classes, alongside Bruce McLean and Gilbert & George. Two of Caro’s most celebrated students, Philip King and John Latham, were also his tutors and he designed the invitations for Latham’s notorious Still and Chew performance piece in August 1966. During the 1960s and 1970s Flanagan counted amongst his friends and collaborators a number of the most avant-garde international artists of his day, including Sol LeWitt, Carl Andre, Joseph Kosuth, Eva Hesse, Walter De Maria and Richard Long to name but a few, artists practicising across sculpture, land art, conceptual art, arte povera and performance art: Flanagan was the only British artist to be included in the seminal exhibition encompassing these new art forms, Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form (Works – Concepts – Processes – Situations – Information) at the Kunsthalle Bern and the ICA.

 

Flanagan cast his first hare in 1979 and exhibited a leaping hare at Documenta 7 in Kassel in 1982, introducing the animal to a global audience. The hare is indelibly associated with Flanagan’s career. The Leaping Hare, the 1972 book by George Eward Evans and David Thomson, was of fundamental importance to Flanagan’s adoption of the creature. An anthropological study of the hare, the book weaves together legends, mythologies, and superstitions from across the world, and gamekeepers and poachers’ anecdotes. Flanagan has said of the hare, ‘I find that the hare is a rich and expressive form that can carry the conventions of the cartoon and the attributes of the human into the animal world. So I use the hare as a vehicle to entertain. I abstract from the human figure, choosing the hare to behave as a human occasionally’ (Barry Flanagan, quoted in Enrique Juncosa, Barry Flanagan Sculpture 1965-2005, exh. cat., Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, 2006, p.65).

 

Flanagan’s Acrobats of 1981 particularly summons the hare as mischievous and playful, the anthropomorphic realisation of the human capacity for lightheartedness and frivolity. In their elaborate balancing act, the hares are poised in space, perfectly positioned in a fleeting pose captured permanently in bronze. Ten years previously, Flanagan had collaborated with the dance group Strider in London to choreograph two dance pieces, and movement, balance and dance or dance elements are ever present in his hares. Through those hares that delight in the joy of living, leaping and dancing, Flanagan harnesses the humour present in much of the work by his contemporaries in the ‘60s and ‘70s, including Bruce McLean, Gilbert & George and Richard Long, presented in bronze. Mel Gooding has seen in the playful hare, the personification of ‘homo ludens, emblems of creativity and of mischievous disregard…for regulated order. (In this sense they are self-portraits, and very like, in fact.)’ (Mel Gooding, ‘First Catch Your Hare: An Essaying in Four Unequal Parts and a Coda, with a Salutation’ in Barry Flanagan Sculpture 1965-2005, op. cit., p.179). Anarchic, subversive, shape-shifting, transgressive and yet delightful and jubilant, the acrobatic hare does indeed seem remarkably familiar to Flanagan himself.

 

The present cast was included in Flanagan’s 1982 Venice Biennale exhibition representing Britain.