Laura Gascoigne

Winning: When Forms Come Alive, at the Hayward, reviewed

Perverse sculptural delights that breathe life into the brutalist spaces – I just wish I could have copped a feel

Defiantly dirty protests: ‘Untitled’, 2022, by Phyllida Barlow [Jo Underhill. Courtesy of the Hayward Gallery] 
issue 17 February 2024

In case you didn’t know, we live in a ‘post-minimalist’ age, sculpturally speaking. Not a maximalist age, though some of the works in the Hayward’s new sculpture show are huge – an age of revolution against neatness.

Who’s to blame for this call to disorder? Women. The two prime movers of this movement, if you can call it that, could not be more different, but both rebelled against minimalist geometry. As a student at Black Mountain College in the late 1940s, Ruth Asawa travelled to Toluca, Mexico, and saw villagers looping wire to make baskets for eggs. It struck her as a way of drawing in three dimensions and later, after becoming a mother of six, of working from home.

Over the years, her distinctive hanging ropes of lobed wire forms grew increasingly intricate and involuted, turning inside out so that smaller forms appeared nested within.

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