CHATSWORTH.- In celebration of its tenth annual exhibition of monumental outdoor sculpture at Chatsworth, Sotheby’s has invited respected art historian and commentator Tim Marlow, Artistic Director of the Royal Academy, to join forces with its specialist team in creating a stimulating and innovative show. Bringing together works by leading pioneers in the field, Beyond Limits: The Landscape of British Sculpture 1950-2015 provides a spectacular overview of the achievements of British sculptors since the mid-twentieth century – all woven through the historic garden of one of Europe’s greatest country estates, the ancestral seat of the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire.

The history of sculpture in Britain is rich and complex, but it was from the post-war era onwards that a serious, internationally respected but fundamentally British tradition emerged and developed into one of the great, yet understated, success stories of post-war British culture.

The seeds were sown in the first decades of the twentieth century by two highly accomplished and original immigrant stone carvers – Jacob Epstein and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska – but began to flourish in the post-war period with Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore. Both through their example and success, they became viewed as the presiding spirits, surrogate parents even, of a vastly expanding area of artistic practice. Successive generations of British sculptors have become increasingly influential within the Modernist and post-Modernist mainstream of Western art and this year’s Beyond Limits exhibition will explore and celebrate aspects of that ongoing story.

Over the last nine years, Sotheby’s 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 art world calendar.

The idea was first conceived by Melanie Clore, Sotheby’s Chairman, Europe, who said: “Since its inception, Beyond Limits has proved to be a consistently surprising and exhilarating annual art event. To mark its tenth year, we are thrilled to be staging our first themed exhibition and to have Tim Marlow working together with Simon Stock, our Senior International Specialist, bringing their expertise and tremendous energy and vision to curating this outstanding show of British sculpture in the garden of Chatsworth.”

Tim Marlow comments: “Combining a selection of some of the most exciting and important monumental sculpture with the extraordinarily beautiful gardens at Chatsworth, we’ve been able to curate an exhibition that responds to the growing interest in outdoor sculpture, and also explores and celebrates the rise of British sculpture. The relationship of the landscape to the works on display is integral - whether they were directly inspired by or conceived in opposition to the idea of landscape. The result, I hope, will be a sparky, creative conversation between some of the best British sculpture of the last 65 years and one of the greatest of all British country houses and its surrounding landscape.”

Commanding bronze sculptures by Dame Barbara Hepworth
The leading female sculptor of the Modernist movement, Barbara Hepworth often drew on the landscape of Britain as inspiration for her work. Tate Britain’s current Hepworth exhibition focuses on the artist’s early career and innovative approach to form and materials, in particular her use of direct carving. The three works shown at Beyond Limits explore her work’s relationship with the British landscape and her extraordinary use of bronze throughout the 1960s and early 1970s. Intended to be exhibited outside, Hepworth’s interactive sculptures are ideally situated in the garden of Chatsworth.

Barbara Hepworth, Three Obliques (Walk In), 1969
Hepworth’s Three Obliques (Walk In) is one of the artist’s most impressive works in bronze, and represents a significant shift in her approach to the ‘Square Form’ and architectural scale. The grandeur and monumentality of the present work is juxtaposed with large circular holes which pierce the three interlocking sections and invite the viewer to interact with the sculpture. The title’s implied invitation to ‘walk in’ and around the work, is perhaps the most advanced investigation of form and space made by Hepworth in the 1960s.

Barbara Hepworth, Sea Form (Atlantic), 1964
Hepworth drew inspiration from the coastal landscape surrounding her home at St. Ives, Cornwall, creating sculptures that directly engage with the environment in which they are set. This work belongs to a small group of large-scale bronzes that take the interaction between land and sea as their theme, primarily based on observations of the coast around Porthcurno, on the far tip of the Penwith peninsula.

Barbara Hepworth, The Family of Man: Figure I, Ancestor I, 1970
Hepworth's Family of Man series established her as a uniquely interpretive sculptor of the upright, standing figure. The Family of Man: Figure 1, Ancestor 1 possesses a distinct beauty and sense of timelessness in its formation, stacked horizontal and vertical bronze shapes which construct a modern-day totem pole that embodies the spirits of past lives.

The Human Body
Reg Butler, Manipulator, 1954
Architect and avant-garde sculptor Reg Butler was known as an artist of exceptional talent, whose idiosyncratic style and experimental approach drew the attention of his contemporary artists and critics alike, with a focus on the ability to express a sense of psychological angst in a physical form. Male figures are rare in Butler’s oeuvre, and when they do appear, they are generally found to be holding or operating some kind of machinery. Manipulator is one of Butler’s earliest largescale bronze sculptures and holds a network of rods whilst his head is thrown back – suspended off the ground on a grid. This work embodies a key motif for the artists now collectively known by the term ‘Geometry of Fear’ – the uneasy balance between the organic and the mechanical.

Lynn Chadwick, Pair of Walking Figures, 1977
Chadwick’s dramatically cloaked figures stand out in contrast with the natural setting of the Chatsworth garden. The monolithic, stately figures stride forward and Chadwick seems not only to have cast their clothing in bronze but the very air that they stir as they move by. Through this work he explores the importance of motion, remarking on the crucial presence of ‘a rhythmic impulse’. In the 1970s Chadwick conceived a simple, yet striking distinction between his male and female figures - men were depicted with rectangular heads, whilst women were endowed with triangular ones. In this example, both figures’ heads are gently inclined bestowing a sense of determination, aligned with Chadwick’s need for his work to possess ‘attitude’. Conceived and cast in 1977, other works from this edition are in the collections of Le Parc du Château, SaintPriest, Rhône and the Museo Ruffino Tamayo Arte Contemporaneo Internacional, Mexico City.

Antony Gormley, Big Gauge II, 2014
Antony Gormley is one of the best known and critically acclaimed artists working in Britain today. His sculptures focus on the dynamic relationship between the human body and the space it inhabits, probing wider concerns about our place within nature and the universe. In the complex interrelation between the blocks that comprise Big Gauge II, the artist also turns the gaze inwards, exploring and exposing the body as a ‘place’ within its own right: the site for the self. Throughout his wide-ranging career, Gormley has worked from casts of his own body – literalising the concept of a body as a habitat, a‘case’ for a human being.

Tony Cragg, Manipulation, 2008
Manipulation brings together many of the practices and preoccupations that have emerged throughout Cragg’s career. Despite the scale and complexity of many of his works, the artist continues to cast his sculpture by hand with a team of assistants. For Cragg, the human hand is ‘the most avant-garde tool’; it is the most basic and vital means of transforming things. The work that will be on display at Chatsworth is based on a hand that has been deformed and mutated into a strange organism with tentacle-like digits. Unintelligible symbols covering the surface of the work deny order and system. Manipulation was exhibited at the Musée Louvre, Paris, in 2011.

Impermanence of Nature
Anya Gallaccio, Blessed, 2000
Scottish-born artist Anya Gallaccio is known for her work with organic matter. In reflection on the consumerist culture of the day, her site-specific installations involve the natural decay of materials, subject to the ravages of time and nature. The present work is not so ephemeral. In Blessed, Gallaccio confronts the issue of organic impermanence, but in this case by turning it on its head: she takes a natural object and immortalises it in durable materials: bronze and ceramic. The tree has now become immune to the natural ravages of time, sprouting an unnatural abundance of perfect apples, frozen and enhanced by human interference.

A History of Carving
Stephen Cox, Dreadnought: Problems of History – The Search for the Hidden Stone
In 1988, Stephen Cox was commissioned to create a work for the new Cairo Opera House. As part of this distinguished request, he was granted access to the quarries of Mons Porphyrites in the Eastern Desert of Egypt - making him the first man to quarry there since the fall of the Roman Empire in the fifth century AD. The present work is carved from this rare porphyry and bears the marks of Roman era labour, with indications of cut lines and splitting inflicted centuries ago. The artist has continued to carve and polish the stone and cleanse it of impurities to expose the rich surface - creating a striking dialogue between the past and the present. As Cox began to work on the present stone, he saw news imagery of a First World War dreadnought battleship rediscovered at the bottom of the sea: the form of the weathered ship, its gnarled prow still intact, bore a handsome resemblance to his piece of raw rock. The title of the work is suggestive of the artist’s focus on engaging with history and the achievements of the past. Another work by the artist, Chrysalis, of the same medium and size to Dreadnought, was purchased by the Tate Gallery, London, in 1992.

Contemporary Art
Sarah Lucas, Florian and Kevin, 2013
Working with found objects and readily available materials, British artist Sarah Lucas creates works that both directly and through subtle innuendo, challenge our conception of gender, sexuality, and identity. Characteristic of Lucas’s practice, Florian and Kevin simultaneously suggest multiple forms, which appear as both oversized vegetables and phallic-shaped sculptures.

Mark Wallinger, The Black Horse, 2015
In 2009, the BBC announced Mark Wallinger as the winning artist for the Ebbsfleet Landmark Project in an important competition for which eminent artists, among whom were Richard Deacon and Christopher Le Brun, submitted designs for a work that would be erected in the landscape of Kent in dialogue with Antony Gormley’s Angel of the North. The present work is a scaled-down life-sized version of the horse in black. The sculpture was made by advanced technology, scanning a horse which the artist part owned named Rivera Red. Coincidentally, the very day that Wallinger won the Ebbsfleet competition, Rivera Red won his race at Lingfield. Wallinger has long been interested in horses and in preparation for his design studied intricately the history of equine representation, from ancient chalk depictions to works by George Stubbs.

Conrad Shawcross, The Dappled Light of the Sun I, II, III, 2015
Conrad Shawcross, at 38 is the youngest Royal Academician. For the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition this year, Shawcross created a largescale immersive work consisting of steel clouds, comprising multiple tetrahedrons set on tripods and standing over six metres high. Through this canopy of clouds, a dazzling, dappled shadow is created by the light of the sun. The mechanically and meticulously devised steel clouds which filter the sun illustrate how fleeting moments of beauty and instability can be created through the practice of perfect order and structure. These three independent works are a variation on the vast sculpture that filled the Royal Academy’s courtyard.

Mark Quinn, Held By Desire (Square Root), 2014
On a visit to London’s Chelsea Flower Show, the artist purchased the gold medal-winning bonsai tree and thereon embarked upon a series of sculptures taking this tree as his subject. A bonsai tree is one which has had its roots pruned and whose size is controlled through prescriptive living conditions. It is therefore a tree which has been subjugated to human interference, suspended in time and conforming to a preordained ideal of its appearance: literally held by our desire. Quinn has long been fascinated with human endeavour to attain beauty and control the natural flow of time. He used 3D technology to reproduce an exact replica of his tree, varying only its size. In concordance with the concept of a bonsai tree, Quinn’s metal trees embody the art of freezing something at a certain time in its natural growth cycle.

A Special Commission for Chatsworth Unveiled
Sandy Brown, Temple, 2015
Temple is a unique work that has been specially commissioned to celebrate the tenth anniversary of Beyond Limits. The piece reflects Sandy Brown’s unusual practice of working on projects which capture a spirit and evolve. A year in the making, Temple comprises meticulous detail. A beautiful cube with a high domed roof is clad inside and out with 5,200 ceramic tiles, fused glass windows by Simon Moore are set in the dome punctuating the roof to let in magical light which throw rays across the circular white floor, and the entrance is made through an asymmetric opening which the viewer discovers after walking through arches and over stepping stones. Trained in the art of making ceramics in Japan, Brown – a recipient of Art Council funding – has been an important international figure for many years. Her works feature regularly in exhibitions all over the world and her art is represented by pieces in major public institutions, including the Victoria & Albert Museum, London.