Bristol, U.K.
Hybridity has been a feature of British sculpture for decades. In the 1960s, it took two forms: transnational, epitomized by Anthony Caro’s formalist sculpture seen mostly in the context of American painting, and transmedial, characterized by an avid blurring of boundaries between painting and sculpture. Internationally, that confusion of sources has been established as the idiom’s radical development. The classical properties of space and volume ceded priority to combining media, appropriating objects (especially from everyday life), and highlighting size, color, and materials. In this context, names such as Thomas Hirschhorn, Jessica Stockholder, and, more recently, Magali Reus come to mind.
The traveling exhibition “These Mad Hybrids” examines the broad ground of heterogeneous sources in sculpture, and its incongruous elements, from a specific perspective. At RWA Bristol, small ceramic sculptures by the British painter John Hoyland were positioned on two long studio tables, encountered at pivotal points within two high-ceilinged galleries. The location of Hoyland’s works was instructive, underlining the organizers’ intention that the 11 freestanding objects by contemporary artists—polymorphous by nature and whimsical by inclination—were seen in response. In the thoughtfully compiled exhibition catalogue, co-organizer Olivia Bax (whose work features in the show) outlines certain shared qualities—idea (versus outcome), color, irony, and humor, as well as an evident “hybridity.” Even a partial list of materials employed in the selected works confirms that last point: tufted wool, plaster, wire mesh, timber, polyurethane foam, cement, metals, plastic flowers and toy weapons, bitumen, and scaffolding poles.
Hoyland, however, limited himself to clay. His sculptures were made in 1994 and shown only once in his lifetime (he died in 2011). In these almost unique experiments during a 50-year career, the forms loop and rise, stalling time to register the immediacy of handling tubes of clay and allowing shapes to emerge in the process. The RWA installation seemed to imply a hierarchy in which the works by the other 10 artists played court to these tabletop pieces, rather like children performing for assembled elders. The impression was unfortunate since no knowledge of Hoyland’s works needs to have existed. Eric Bainbridge’s Made in Hong Kong (1987), the earliest work in the show (except for a selection of Hoyland canvases that briefly survey his career from the perspective of sculptural structure), predates Hoyland’s ceramics.
Bainbridge’s wonderful creation gloriously demonstrates the irony and humor promised by Bax. Taller than any viewer, the object punctures the pomposity of public sculpture with its statuesque rendition of a corkscrew, bottle opener, and pulled cork, an unholy trinity of products symbolizing the booming ’80s. The work’s inspirations form a hybrid of Arte Povera and the planar metal sculpture of the 1960s, with its clear outline and all-over color, to which Hoyland, coincidentally, had also responded. Bainbridge teases the paradigm playfully, the “cool” demeanor parodied by a surface of light blue synthetic fur.
Bax’s How do you do (2019) pushes abstract material hybridity—steel, chicken wire, newspaper pulp, household paint—toward everyday life by including an element appropriated from it (bicycle handlebars), as if to restrain her flight into whimsical artistry with a familiar, if heavily veiled, point of access. Otherwise, her sculpture leans physically and theoretically on the same New Generation figures in Bainbridge’s crosshairs, artists like Phillip King and William Tucker whose work discarded plinths, inferred weightlessness and movement, promoted color, and concealed Surrealist urges within a cool, abstract coating. Bax adopts a comparable hybridity, in which figure-like mass acts as a counterpoint to abstract rectilinear planes.
“These Mad Hybrids” regularly crosses the threshold to equivocal meaning. In John Summers’s High Ground (2023), the fragmentation of the body moves beyond humor. A smile gives way to alarm at how closely he approaches Goya’s depictions of mutilation in warfare. Summers also folds in sci-fi overtones that recall the proximity of the hybrid, in literature and then film, to the gothic extremes of the Romantic era. From Summers’s disturbing image, the imagination can soon settle on the Rubik’s Cube intellectual agility of Jessi Reaves. Her concentrated, cuboid assemblage, Three bowl table (2019), has impeccable sculptural credentials; but then those properties are swiveled as if by a dexterous wrist. The presumed utility of the construction flips to the functionless-ness of pure form—inside becomes outside; contents usually unseen, like upholstery, appear in full visibility; and utensils slide beneath glass, beyond touch and out of use.
Anna Reading’s wall-mounted Bouquet (2022) is of the barbed variety, flaunting oyster shells, fishing wire, and thread, laboriously fixed and wound onto metal rods. The structure in turn supports a beautifully theatrical yet enigmatic construction that defies explanation: maybe a carnivalesque attire of blue fluted sails and a beaked bird’s head momentarily pegged to await wearing. Andrew Sabin’s many-footed From Time to Time (2018) seems to pause in mid-stride. A mixed progeny of animal and vegetal, prehistoric and Muppet, this immense creature sports a swaddled epidermis suggesting a streaky camouflage of flaxen yellow and green (partly attributable to casting with margarine), which relates to the exuberantly pitted and dotted, light-reflecting surfaces of Hoyland’s tabletop ceramics.
At the time when those works were exhibited in 1994, Hoyland wrote, “What I really enjoyed was the freedom to ‘try anything,’ the unexpected results with some of the color…” He applied glazes with the same taste for risk and self-challenging informality that distinguished his abstract-figurative painting of the 1990s, and further unanticipated outcomes arose when they were fired. Consequently, Hoyland’s work exudes the compelling fecundity of improvisation that results from creative transgression—a spirit that “These Mad Hybrids” projects with liberating effect.
“These Mad Hybrids” will travel to Millennium Gallery, Sheffield, U.K., February 20–May 18, 2025.
