British artist Phyllida Barlow, who put humble materials to work in massive works she called “non-monumental” because of their rejection of sleek, masculinized forms, died on March 13 in London at the age of seventy-eight. His death has been confirmed by Hauser & Wirth Gallery, which has represented the artist for over a decade. Barlow served as a mentor to artists such as Tacita Dean, Sarah Lucas and Rachel Whiteread before gaining widespread recognition herself in the late years. “The image and the pictorial are my enemies. It’s them that I always want to escape,” she added. said art forum‘s Sherman Sam in 2011. “I want the work to change depending on where it is viewed from so that its image and pictorial identity are constantly dissolved.”
Barlow was born in Newcastle, England in 1944, great-great-granddaughter of Charles Darwin. Soon after, the family moved to London, whose bomb-stricken post-World War II landscape would prove influential in their practice. Barlow in 1960 enrolled at Chelsea College of Fine Art. There she studied with sculptor George Fullard, whom she credits with shaping her vision of creating art as an adventure. From Fullard she also absorbed the idea that a sculpture that “falls or breaks” is as valuable and interesting as a sculpture that retains its shape: the concept of impermanence was to become a central theme in her practice.
After joining the Slade School of Fine Art in 1963, where she spent four years and met her husband, artist Fabian Peake, Barlow married in 1966 and took up a series of teaching jobs, continuing to doing work as his family grew to include five children. With only a few hours at a time to focus on her practice, Barlow became a master of creating under tight deadlines. “I had instituted this rule for myself that there had to be something in the studio when time was up,” she said. said a group of investigators from the Courtauld Institute in London in 2017. “No matter what, good or bad, something just had to be there to prove that I had been there.” Among the materials she used in the making of her work were fabric, cardboard, polystyrene, plaster and quick-drying cement, all of which she implemented into colorful works that evoked both weight, in their blocky or clumsy forms, and lightness, thanks to their modest and fragile materials. She rejected the characterization of these materials as being random or coming from the street or garbage cans. “The precision and attention to detail inherent in the production processes are not obvious characteristics, but they are there,” she said in 2017.
In 1988 Barlow accepted a teaching position at Slade, from which she would eventually retire as Professor Emeritus in 2009. She was shortlisted for the prestigious Turner Prize in 1998, and in 2004 exhibited her work at the BALTIC in Gateshead, England. Two years later, she won the Hugo Boss Prize and, in 2008, was elected to the Royal Academy of Arts. She has enjoyed solo exhibitions of her work at the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, Florida; Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh; the Ludwig Forum für Internationale Kunst, Germany; and Kunsthalle Zürich, among other places. In 2014 she was asked to create a commission for the Duveen Gallery at Tate London. “His sculptures have an inherent clumsiness,” wrote art forum‘s Sam after seeing his massive cardboard and wood artwork there, titled Dock. “Barlow’s achievement is to have made this awkwardness his own.” In 2017, she represented the UK at the Venice Biennale. Barlow was appointed CBE in 2015 and was made a Dame by Queen Elizabeth in 2019.
“I’m interested in the cycle of damage and repair,” she told the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in a video interview in 2022. The embodiment of his work at that time had become even more poignant. Seeing her work at Frieze Los Angeles in March of that year as the Covid-19 pandemic finally began to wane, Andrew Berardini wrote in this magazine“The messy beauty of his sculptures – their stained wooden feet delicately holding paint-splattered balls, a strip of red fabric, the draping of a stiffened net – reflected what I felt: a little rough but still in place.”
