DE LA MOORE LA HIRST 60 DE ANI DE SCULPTURA BRITANICA (FROM MOORE TO HIRST: SIXTY YEARS OF BRITISH SCULPTURE)

A major new exhibition of 20th Century British sculpture specifically selected for the prestigious National Museum of Art of Romania, Bucharest, From Moore to Hirst forms the closing event for the UK/Romania creative partnerships festival which opened with a major Brancusi exhibition presented at Tate Modern a year ago.

Comprising sixty works by eighteen artists and selected by Visual Arts Department, the show is the largest British contemporary sculpture exhibition in Romania for several decades. Utilising artworks from the British Council Collection and supplemented with major loans from the collections of the Tate Gallery and the Arts Council of England, as well as a number of individual lenders, the exhibition focuses on the last sixty years of sculptural production in the UK, providing audiences with the chance to see a comprehensive overview of major works charting the spirit and invention that has characterised British sculpture during this exceptional period.

Opening with the Brancusi influenced exploration into figurative abstraction in the 1940’s and 1950’s, the exhibition charts development through British Pop art, Coloured Sculpture, Conceptual Sculpture, Land Art and the New British Sculpture of the 1980’s, culminating in the work of the yBa’s in the 1990’s.

Artists exhibiting in From Moore to Hirst are Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, Eduardo Paolozzi, Phillip King, William Tucker, Anthony Caro, Michael Craig-Martin, Richard Long, Paul Neagu, Tony Cragg, Richard Deacon, Antony Gormley, Mona Hatoum, Rachel Whiteread, Tacita Dean, Douglas Gordon, Martin Creed and Damien Hirst.

An education programme and supporting contextual material accompany the exhibition. A dual-language full-colour 96 page catalogue containing analysis of each individual artist and extensive essays by Tim Marlow (The Roots of British Sculpture) and Adrian Guta (British Sculpture from a Romanian Perspective).