Andrew Lambirth

Back to nature

By Leafy Ways: Early Work by Ivor Abrahams<br /> Against Nature: The hybrid forms of modern sculpture<br /> <em>Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, until 4 May</em>

issue 16 February 2008

By Leafy Ways: Early Work by Ivor Abrahams
Against Nature: The hybrid forms of modern sculpture
Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, until 4 May

The Henry Moore Institute is one of our foremost sculptural venues, a focus for study and scholarship, equipped with an impressive library and archive specialising in British sculpture. Opened in 1993 on The Headrow in the centre of Leeds, it is devoted to telling the story of sculpture in Britain, while also taking into account the context of continental modernism. It regularly mounts small, intense and often provocative (in the sense of intellectually challenging) exhibitions. Among the English artists to have been shown there are the contemporary sculptors David Nash and Stephen Cox, and the somewhat less familiar Frank Dobson (1886–1963), an avant-garde classicist rather out of fashion today. An institute for the promotion of sculpture can do no better than arrange shows of work by those who are talented and worth considering but who have somehow slipped through the net of general awareness.

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