ArtObituary

Barry Flanagan

Artist who defined himself as an English-speaking itinerant European sculptor

Barry Flanagan, who has died of motor neurone disease aged 68, decided upon his vocation early: "I was a fully fledged sculptor from the age of 17. I stepped right into it and embraced the physical world." In late 1979 the first of his trademark hares was cast in bronze, the classic material he believed best suited an artist whose vision depended on a linear predisposition, the dark surfaces lending what he called bloom and drama to the work. Flanagan's hares adopted the energies of humans, their facial expressions ranging from insouciant to melancholic.

The wide appeal of his bronze animals (also cougars, elephants and horses) seemed at odds with the more oblique nature of his early works, which were made in humble materials, such as sand, sticks and hessian. His art was associated with the minimal and land art movements of the 1960s, frequently addressing process and language (a rope piece installed in two spaces, for example, was titled 2sp rope 2'67/9). With hindsight, the consistently authentic, original nature of the work is rooted in Flanagan's way of lightly touching the materials and his rather British (or Celtic) understatement and playfulness.

Flanagan's life story has been well documented, since he was eager to cite experiences and people as the context for particular achievements. He was born in Prestatyn, north Wales, not far from Liverpool, where his father worked for Warner Brothers film studios. After boarding school at Foxhunt Manor prep school and Mayfield college, in East Sussex, Flanagan briefly studied architecture, and then sculpture, at Birmingham College of Art (1957–58).

Supporting himself by various short-term jobs, for bakers, frame-makers and builders, he mastered techniques, which he called "recipes". He sampled five art schools, choosing St Martin's in London, after having attended in the summer of 1961 an evening course there led by Anthony Caro where the students were set exercises such as being given wire and told to make a sculpture of a "ZABAUUUM". While he was still a student, Flanagan's stitched cloth creations, filled with plaster or sand, aroused the interest of dealers and critics. In his final assessment, Flanagan's tutor, the sculptor Phillip King, noted this distraction but judged him to be already a deep thinker, an artist whose work was surprising and likely to remain challenging.

Flanagan was attracted to the concrete poets who gathered at Better Books across from St Martin's on the Charing Cross Road. He co-produced a college magazine lasting five issues, Silâns (its title a phonetic version of the French for "silence"). After being given a copy of the Evergreen Review of May-June 1960, the issue devoted to Alfred Jarry (1873‑1907), he developed a lifelong appreciation of Jarry, his character Ubu and his science of pataphysics, or the "science of imaginary solutions". Writing in 1965 to Caro, who was away in America, he defined a young sculptor's challenge: "to assert himself twice as hard in a negative way".

The one-page text by Flanagan published in Studio International in September 1967 contains a statement frequently quoted: "One merely causes things/to reveal themselves to the sculptural awareness. It is the/awareness that develops, not the agents of the sculptural phenomena." It appeared opposite a photograph of the curious work comprised of four wobbly, tapering columns, a large linoleum ring and a rope, titled Four casb 2 '67, ringl 1 '67 and rope (gr 2sp 60) 6 '67 (now in the Tate Collection) that was installed the same month in the Biennale des Jeunes in Paris. A second work shown in Paris, 1 ton corner piece '67 (one hundredweight of sand poured on to the floor, scooped four times from the centre) had first appeared in the artist's inaugural one-person show at the Rowan Gallery in London in August 1966. Of variable dimensions, depending on context, its gentle curves reminded the artist, he said, of playing in sand dunes near his childhood home.

These works preceded similar pieces by Carl Andre and Robert Smithson who, in 1966, were unaware of Flanagan's parallel explorations. However, interest in "land art" and arte povera spread at a wildfire pace and Flanagan was invited to show in the leading private galleries and museums of Europe, the US and Japan. His contributions to temporary and performance-based events, like the short film A Hole in the Sea (1969), shot on the beach at Scheveningen, near The Hague, for the Land Art group exhibition (actually a Berlin television broadcast masterminded by Gerry Schum) are now the subject of academic research.

Flanagan's work was championed by the writers Gene Baro and Charles Harrison and the curators of the seminal exhibitions of 1969, particularly Eddie de Wilde, at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (OP Losse Schroeven) and Harald Szeeman in Berne (When Attitudes Become Form).

Michael Compton, selecting 6 at the Hayward in 1969, expected Flanagan to produce something "paradoxically very cheap and yet unsaleable, a parable therefore of an ideal art". Although fundamentally bohemian in character, Flanagan resented his relative poverty. Obliged to pay a girl acting in one of his films with home-made money, he explained this expedient as underscoring "the dreadful way in which money punishes art".

In 1975 Flanagan established a trade account called Rowford Process and the following year joined the Waddington Galleries. Rudi Fuchs, in the foreword to the early retrospective he initiated at the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, in 1977, recognised the "purity of position" necessary for the avant-garde artist wishing to effect historical change, and contrasted this strategy with Flanagan's practice, "based on the notion of skill within a particular craft".

When the exhibition travelled to the Arnolfini in Bristol and the Serpentine, London, new works in Hornton stone and marble were added, roughly shaped and stacked, and revealing a quixotic, "animalistic" character, such as Miracle in the Cabbage Patch (1978). The idiosyncratic silk-screened poster came from a design with two crossed axolotls suspended over mountains, compass and right angle, one image among a terrific range of works on paper – portraits, diagrams, collages, prints and scores of notebook doodles.

Flanagan taught at St Martin's and the Central School of Art (1967–71) where Henry Abercrombie and Andy Elton ran the foundry and they invited him to work in their business A&A Sculpture Casting in Bow, formed in 1978.

Modelling a hare from one bought from a butcher, Flanagan also found inspiration from an earlier sighting of an animal he had seen bounding east to west on the Sussex Downs. George Ewart Evans and David Thomson's 1972 book The Leaping Hare was used as a reference, as was the animal in world mythologies, but Flanagan insisted that his creative decisions came when shaping the armature of the sculpture, and were governed by a graphic rather than volumetric sensibility. The variations and new editions realised over the next 30 years depended on the scale and the identity of the base, either a classic form, such as a latticed pyramid, upturned anvil or cast-iron bell, or a cultural one, with examples ranging from cricket stumps to a model of the Empire State Building.

Flanagan travelled in 1981 to Washington to a Rodin exhibition and paid homage to the master with reconceptions of The Thinker and Nijinsky (Rodin's improvised plaster for Nijinsky measured 18cm, whereas the dancer's body was eventually reconceived by Flanagan at more than five metres high). In 1990 a pair of Leaping Hare sculptures, commissioned by the Kawakyo Company, Osaka, were placed atop high columns at the main entrance to a hotel on the Japanese coast. Parades of bronze figures were installed temporarily on Park Avenue in New York, Grant Park in Chicago and on O'Connell Street in Dublin.

Flanagan gave sculptures to Jesus College, Cambridge, and a Kouros Horse to the town of Santa Eulalia near his house in Ibiza. Other permanent fixtures are Hare on Bell in the Equitable Life Tower West, New York; Nine Foot Hare in the Victoria Plaza, London; and Leaping Hare on a Crescent and Bell at Broadgate, London. Exhibitions have been organised by prestigious venues, among them the Pompidou Centre in Paris, Fundación "La Caixa" in Madrid, the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Tate Liverpool, the museum in Recklinghausen, Germany and IMMA (the Irish Museum of Modern Art) in Dublin. Earlier this year a small retrospective was held in the New Art Centre in Wiltshire.

Flanagan defined himself as an English-speaking itinerant European sculptor. His restlessness was apparent in short-lived ventures with collaborators, from skilled carvers in Pietrasanta, Italy, to diorama enthusiasts meeting at the Museum Tavern, London, and in his many changes of residence. Leaving Kentish Town in the early 1980s, he moved through a sequence of London addresses, spending part of the year in Ibiza, as well as periods in Amsterdam, New York and Dublin; the one consistent action was the laying of his trademark green carpet in every home.

In his last years, he was accompanied during seasonal migrations by his partner Jessica Sturgess, a kindred spirit, their ideal means of transport a vintage camper van. In his notebooks, Flanagan reflected on his increasingly marginal position, wavering between a desire to computerise his records and sort out his legacy and a need for control. His speech was marked by long pauses and elliptical observations; however, he loosened up in the congenial atmosphere of bars. He was a proud Royal Academician – elected in 1991, the year he was appointed OBE – loyal to old friends and a generous patron of favoured causes.

One can observe essential nuances in the demeanour (and in the quality) of Flanagan's individual hares. The seated posture sometimes conveys dejection or boredom, as in the creature with folded legs uncomfortably perched on a gigantic computer, or the lonely fellow in a little boat. Flanagan remarked: "I have never travelled far, in the sense that I have never been a voice of my generation's aspirations and being a happy man at work and liking things to do, never strayed far from the practical confines of occupation."

He is survived by two daughters, Samantha (Flan) and Tara, from his marriage to Sue Lewis; a son, Alfred, and daughter, Annabelle, by Renate Widmann; and by Jessica.

Barry Flanagan, sculptor, born 11 January 1941; died 31 August 2009

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