WOKING.- Commemorating 25 years since Elisabeth Frink’s death in 1993, Elisabeth Frink: A Collector’s Passion from The Ingram Collection explores nature and humanity through an emotive body of work.

The exhibition includes personal responses to the artworks from Chris Ingram, owner of The Ingram Collection. Frink’s art is a personal passion of Chris’s, with many of her paintings, sculptures and drawings being prevalent within the collection, one of the largest publicly accessible collections of Modern British Art in the UK.

Shedding light on the key themes Frink (1930-1993) explored throughout her career, the exhibition will explore representations of animals, man, and their relationship to each other. From early on, Frink regularly returned to motifs of standing men, men on horseback, men’s heads, horses, warriors and birds falling, flying, attacking. These often violent and vulnerable depictions are vehicles for expressions of pain, aggression and predatoriness.

Sculptures such as Warrior II (1964) and Riace III (1986) are prime examples of Frinks exploration of masculine power. Frink’s men are muscular and strong, but also naked and defenceless. For the simple act of sculpting men’s bodies, Frink was unusual for a female artist at the time, and even to this day. Protruding jawlines and large chins feature as rejections of classical ideals, and this misshapenness is taken even further with Soldier’s Head II (1965). Based on her second husband Ted Pool, who suffered shrapnel injuries in World War Two, Frink presents us with a man damaged beyond repair by war.

She returns to the brutality of war with Spinning Man II (1960) portraying a falling man, disoriented in mid-air, recalling her childhood experiences of witnessing aeroplane crashes near her Suffolk home, and RAF pilots without parachutes during World War Two. Similarly, the acrylic painting Wounded Horse (1989) questions man’s use of horses in battle, and the stoical spirit of the animal amidst the chaos of human carnage.

Find out more about Frink’s work and its place in The Ingram Collection on Thursday 29 November 2018, as Jo Baring, Director and Curator of The Ingram Collection, will speak about the life and career of the renowned sculptor, artist and printmaker.