Elizabeth Frink
(14 November 1930 - 18 April 1993) |
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male nude sculptures Art Work
| Name: |
Elizabeth Frink |
| Gender: |
Female |
| Place of Birth: |
Thurlow, Suffolk, England |
| Nationality: |
British |
| Birth: |
14 November 1930 |
| Death: |
18 April 1993 |
| Website: |
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| Past Auctions: |
Click Here |
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Quick Facts
| Known For: |
male nude sculptures |
| Medium: |
bronze, clay, plaster, wood |
| Method: |
bronze, clay, plaster, wood sculpture |
| Style: |
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| Fine Art Profession(s): |
Sculptor
Printmaker
Illustrator |
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Biography
Elisabeth Frink is among the best represented women artists. Helen Lessore gave Frink her first break, inviting her to show in a group exhibition at the Beaux Arts Gallery. Frink focused on male figures, rarely portraying women. Her men can be menacing, but are often vulnerable, unheroic and contemplative. Her Horizontal Birdman of 1962 at Manchester Airport is falling helplessly.
There is an intriguing mystery at the centre of her art in that many of her sculptures bear a striking resemblance to the artist herself. This could be read as a form of self portraiture, overlaid onto the male figure, although Frink refused any suggestion of androgyny in her work. She often spoke of her love for her father, and the distinctive bone structure of her figures possibly arose from her memory of him. Frink made portraits of the composer Sir William Walton, whose bust 1976 is now in the Royal Festival Hall, and the conductor Sir George Solti, whose portrait in 1983 was commissioned for the Royal Opera House.
She was also a prolific printmaker, and illustrated Aesop's Fables London 1968. Chaucer's Canterbury Tales London 1972, and the Iliad and Odyssey London 1978.
Among Frink's many exhibitions were a series of solo shows at the Waddington Galleries, London, and exhibitions at the Kettle's Yard Gallery, Cambridge (1973), the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Bretton Hall (1983) (1994) and the Royal Academy, London (1985). The National Museum of Women in the Arts. Washington DC held a major retrospective in 1990. There are now catalogue raisonnes of Frink's sculpture (London 1998).
Frink was elected a Royal Academician in 1977, and was invited to be the first woman president of the Academy, but declined, feeling that it would distract her from her work. Her affiliation with the Academy, figurative use of the traditional materials plaster and bronze, and the strong religious and symbolic current in her art, have meant that she fell out of critical faver.
She has, however, been discussed in a feminist context, and her work was included in the touring exhibition Women's Images of Men that opened at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in 1980. The recent resurgence of the figurative and spiritual in sculpture suggests that she may now be reassessed. An exhibition of her sculpture opened the new Jerwood Sculpture Park at Witley Court, Worcestershire, in 2000. Public works include Walking Madonna (1981) on the green outside Salisbury Cathedral, and a cast of the eagle she designed for the lectern of Coventry Cathedral in 1962 was chosen as the memorial for President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas. Frink's last work was installed in the year of her death.
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Samples of Work
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