British artist Phyllida Barlow, best known for her sculptures made from everyday materials which she described as “non-monumental”, died yesterday March 12 at the age of 78 in London. His death has been confirmed by Hauser & Wirth, his representative gallery since 2010.
Barlow found international fame in the early 2010s after retiring from a successful teaching career and went on to represent Britain at the 2017 Venice Biennale. His site-specific sculptures evoke destruction landscapes of London in the aftermath of World War II, when Barlow was a child, suggesting death, blood and violations of the human body. Just as Barlow forced the viewer to make sense of his sculptures, the artist also created optical illusions with weight and structure. She combined heavy materials such as cement and metal with low-cost ones such as Styrofoam and plywood, constructing towering, large-scale works that seemed to defy gravity and were in danger of falling.
Despite their generally large dimensions, Barlow said of his work that it was “unmonumental”, dismissing the elegance and grandiosity of some modernist sculpture. “Making pastiches out of light and disposable things, the monument or the monumental,” she said in a 2010 interview. “The latter has this heroic and macho thing that attracts me, but which conversely I could not do myself.”
Born in Newcastle, England in 1944, Barlow enrolled in art school in 1960 and married fellow artist Fabian Peake six years later. After holding various teaching positions, she became a professor at the Slade School of Fine Art in London in 1988. and taught there until his retirement in 2008. After decades of teaching art students such as Tacita Dean and Rachel Whiteread, Barlow found a wider audience for his own work.
In 2010, New York New Museum presented Barlow’s first solo exhibition. Subsequent solo exhibitions included exhibits at Dallas’s Nasher Sculpture Center and that of London Great Britain. In 2017, Barlow presented his colorful series madness at the Venice Biennale. Among other endeavors, Barlow protruded sharp “rock” shards from a gallery wall, placed huge round pebbles on tiny posts, and attached a faux balcony to another section of the space’s interior wall. His sculptures overflow the limits of the British pavilion.
In a 2018 review of Phyllida Barlow: Tilt exhibition at Hauser & Wirth for HyperallergicThomas Michelli called Barlow’s forms “ugly, coarse and wild” – but “performed with such a wealth of wisdom and experience that as we allow ourselves to be immersed in it, we can only feel elated.”
Barlow leaves behind her husband Fabian Peake, their children Florence, Clover, Tabitha, Eddie and Lewis, her siblings Camilla Whitworth-Jones and Jeremy Barlow, and grandchildren.
