Its whereabouts between 19 remain a mystery. But years later a collector contacted the Frink estate to say that he had bought a work that fitted the description in 1991, and it was now standing in his back garden. John Bosco, was believed to have been destroyed in a lorry crash in 1960. In 1952, when Frink was still a student at Chelsea, she was commissioned to create a sculpture for a Catholic church near Reading. An early sculpture, thought lost for decades, reappeared in a garden in 2015 This has been reflected in her prices which, according to The Daily Telegraph, have increased by 8035.6 per cent since the 1970s. ![]() This sculpture would prove to be her last as, just one week after its installation she died aged 62. ![]() Despite this, she was working on a colossal statue, 'Risen Christ', for Liverpool Cathedral. Elisabeth Frink was diagnosed with cancer in her early sixties. This all changed last year, when The Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts in Norwich, not far from her Suffolk birthplace, sought to re-establish Frink as one of the most important British artists of the 20th century. Many of her drawings from the 1960's appeared as prints executed by the Curwen Press. Yet as one of the few British sculptors of the post-war generation to sell for £1million at auction she has, surprisingly, been somewhat overlooked by British museum curators in the past 20 years. One of her most famous series, Running Man, leave us wondering whether the figure is running towards us or trying to escape. Seemingly heroic at first glance, a closer look reveals a vulnerable side to these bronze warriors, whose exposed flesh and textured surfaces imply a brutalised fragility or shell shock. On her first day teaching at St Martin’s she got into a lift, to be confronted by Pitchforth shouting, ‘There’s nobody strips like you, Lis!’ Her male figures are both ‘strong’ and ‘fugitive’īy the early 1960s, Frink was becoming known for her sculptures of the male figure. ‘I used to scoot off in the evenings and earn quite good money, getting my bottom sort of heated up by the fire on one side, and freezing on the other!’ she recalled. In her twenties, Frink modelled for John SkeapingĪfter leaving Chelsea, Frink modelled for the painter Vivian Pitchforth (1895-1982), who taught at St Martin’s School of Art, and the sculptor John Skeaping (1901-1980). As she said later, ‘We were all immensely cheerful, busy getting on with what we wanted to do’. Frink’s work was collected by the jazz musician George Melly (1926-2007) and she held wild parties in her shared flat in Chelsea. ‘He used to take up these extraordinary poses with fingers raised in elegant positions.’Įvenings were spent in pubs inhabited by Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, John Minton and Michael Andrews. Days were spent in the studios at Chelsea where Quentin Crisp (1908-1999) was a life model - ‘he used to hang upside down! And in a crucifixion’, she said. Frink recalled London in the 1950s as a particularly vibrant artistic period. While their sculptures may have seemed the prophetic embodiment of Cold War politics, the artists of The Geometry of Fear were not. The sculpture, with its embryonic wings, is also, said Jammet, "the epitome of the way she saw man, as capable of great heroism – like her soldier father whom she worshipped – but also hugely vulnerable".Frink went to the same London pubs as Bacon and Freud Lin Jammet, Frink's son and manager of her estate, said: "It's a really important piece because it gives you a sense of the speed and spontaneity with which my mother worked, showing how she'd model quickly in plaster and then carve the form back." The sculpture was gifted to the Art Fund by the Frink estate and her gallery, the Beaux Arts, with the proviso that it went on display and not into storage. Another influence was her memory of an air force boyfriend who was badly injured when his parachute failed to inflate. The sculptor, who died in 1993, is thought to have been inspired to create the 1.9 metre-high half-man, half-bird figure in plaster after reading in Paris Match about a real-life birdman, Léo Valentin, who tried to fly, Icarus-like, with wings. ![]() The work, valued at £250,000, has been gifted to the Leeds sculpture collection in a deal through the Art Fund charity.įrink is known for her battered and distorted-looking human and animal figures, and curator Sophie Raikes believes her most interesting work is from the late 50s and early 60s, "when she was developing a new style and combining figurative and animal forms in truly original ways".
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