LONDON.- Sotheby’s unveiled this year’s Beyond Limits selling exhibition, held in the historic grounds of Chatsworth, ancestral seat of the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire and one of Europe’s greatest private houses. The 22 sculptures selected for this year’s show include works by established modern masters such as Aristide Maillol, Eduardo Chillida, Germaine Richier and Giacomo Manzù in addition to leading contemporary artists such as Marc Quinn, Christopher Le Brun, Lawrence Holofcener and Michal Rovner, as well as China’s celebrated Xu Bing.

Now in its ninth year, Beyond Limits has firmly established itself as one of the most prestigious platforms for the display and sale of modern and contemporary outdoor sculpture and a key event in the arts calendar. The exhibition opened to the public on 8th September and will run until 26th October 2014.

Sotheby’s Simon Stock, curator of the exhibition, said: “This year’s Beyond Limits is remarkable both in terms of the range of major works and the unprecedented way in which we’ve been able to display them, allowing for exciting new dialogues with both the buildings and the landscape at Chatsworth. Sotheby’s has been staging exhibitions here for nine years now, and yet every year, each new group of works interacts with this extraordinary location in a host of new and unexpected ways.”

Contemporary Chinese Sculpture
Xu Bing, Tao Hua Yuan: A Lost Village Utopia, mixed media, 2013-2014
Xu Bing is one of the best known and critically acclaimed contemporary artists working in China today. His outstanding work was unveiled at the opening of this year’s exhibition both in and around the Seahorse fountain, a circular pond on the historic South lawn in the Chatsworth Garden – a spectacular location usually off limits to the public. While the Seahorse fountain undergoes restoration, Sotheby’s was offered the opportunity to transform this centrepiece, to install Tao Hua Yuan: A Lost Village Utopia. This multi-media work by the acclaimed artist incorporates both natural and man- made elements in the form of natural rock formations, ceramics, and exotic plants in addition to mist effects. A dreamlike landscape, it brings Chinese ink painting and ancient fables to life in three- dimensional form.

Major Works by Contemporary Artists
Christopher Le Brun, Maro, nestos marble, 2014
Paying homage to the celebrated Roman poet Virgil, Le Brun’s marble wing rises out of the earth, towering above its viewers at five metres high. The marble sculpture reflects the importance of the wing as a symbol of strength and elemental power in Roman and Classical culture. While this work was produced specially for Beyond Limits at Chatsworth, a similar bronze version is installed in the City of London near the Bank of England and a variation of the model faces the sea at St. Helier in Jersey. Further recognition of his extraordinary corpus of work is reflected in Le Brun’s election as 26th President of the Royal Academy in 2011.

Norbert Kricke, Raumplastik Große F.II, stainless steel, 1980
One of the most important German Post- War sculptors and a key figure in the Zero art movement, Norbert Kricke’s main opus are his ’Raumplastiken’ (spatial sculptures) and his fundamental thesis that ‘space’ within a sculpture would represent freedom. This work is a compelling example of Kricke’s visionary approach to spatial sculpture, as he harnesses the energy of the straight lines and clear horizontal and vertical angles of the sculpture. The work comprises metal tubes that dynamically cut into space in an attempt to make the simultaneous experience of space and time visible through art.

British Sculptors
British artists are well represented in this year’s Beyond Limits. Showcasing extraordinary works that span 50 years of British sculpture, from the 1960s through to the present, featured artists include Phillip King, Lynn Chadwick, Bill Woodrow, Marc Quinn, Christopher Le Brun, and Julian Wild.

Antony Gormley, Construct II, cast iron, 1996
The figure sculptures by internationally acclaimed sculptor and Turner Prize winner Antony Gormley have attained an iconic status in British art. Speaking about this work at Beyond Limits, Gormley commented, "Construct II is part of a series of solid cast iron works initiated as a materialisation of the void space evident in the concrete geometrical blocks such as Flesh, Base and Sense from the early 1990s. In this work, the body is a sensor of its own condition, the palms of the hands and the soles of the feet are vertical planes pushing against virtual walls. The body as the site of life is tested against the room as the site of the body: implicating the viewer's presence in the process."

Lawrence Holofcener, Allies, bronze, 1995
Anglo-American sculptor Lawrence Holofcener’s work Allies is a poignant testament to one of the most important relationships of the twentieth century, that of Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt. This much- loved work was originally conceived as a commemoration of the prolonged period of peace of which these two men were the architects. Another cast of this subject has achieved landmark status on London’s Bond Street. The sculpture is imbued with an extraordinary intimacy between the two figures, and remains pertinent to this day.

Presenting an impressive roster of six female artists, the largest in the history of Beyond Limits, this year’s exhibition also includes works by Michal Rovner – whose work is displayed within the house – Alice Aycock, Beverly Pepper, Lori Park and Eilís O’Connell.

Female Artists
Germaine Richier, La Montagne, bronze, 1955-56
Celebrated for her creations that combine classical forms with human-animal hybrids, Richier’s La Montagne is a powerful example of the artist’s mature and most expressive phase. It is one of the largest sculptures she created and this immense pair of duelling chimera is a prime example of her unique work. The delicate balance of long and slender limbs seems to symbolise the contemporary existentialism that gripped Richier's war- weary generation, with bodily deformations becoming more accentuated in an attempt to convey a greater sense of anguish.

Classic Sculpture from Modern Masters
Aristide Maillol, La Rivière, bronze, 1938-40
La Rivière serves as one of the most magnificent conceptions of socio- political unrest in twentieth-century European art. The work was conceived in the two years of heightening tensions and troubles before the outbreak of the Second World War, and forms a notable exception in Maillol’s repertoire of female figures of serenity, balance and beauty. In her active contortion and bold instability, the woman of this sculpture abandons his emulation of Classical form and staging, with the natural, unchecked energies of the river coming to mirror the social and political uncertainties of the world around him. The work is one of Maillol's most highly-regarded sculptures, with casts in the permanent collections of both the Museum of Modern Art in New York and in the Tuileries, Paris.