Though Australian artist Alun Leach-Jones is known primarily for his paintings, he began to make sculptures more than 20 years ago in 1992. Working in his studio—a converted factory building in North Sydney, near Sydney Harbor—he made three-dimensional works that, at the time, he did not consider showing. They were meant to be as distinct as possible from his paintings, which are recognized in and beyond Australia as accomplished Modernist studies in abstraction. Made from cut and carved wood and then cast in bronze, Leach-Jones’s early sculptural efforts gave him both the dimensional freedom and the intellectual space to work out ideas taken from the high culture of classic Modernism. According to the artist, modernity in art “is not a closed system; on the contrary, if it is subject to intense questioning, it demonstrates a remarkable elasticity as a theoretical and visual system.”…see the entire article in the print version of January/February’s Sculpture magazine.
