Anthony Caro, Mat Collishaw, Tony Cragg, Michael Craig-Martin, Richard Deacon, Barry Flanagan, Anya Gallaccio, Gilbert and George, Douglas Gordon, Antony Gormley, Siobhán Hapaska, Mona Hatoum, Damien Hirst, Anish Kapoor, Phillip King, Michael Landy, Richard Long, Sarah Lucas, Eduardo Paolozzi, Richard Wentworth, Rachel Whiteread, Richard Wilson, Bill Woodrow

This major new exhibition of British sculpture is the result of a collaboration between the Taipei Fine Arts Museum and the British Council. Comprising 61 works by 23 artists, the exhibition covers the 40 year period, 1961-2001, and provides the first opportunity for audiences in Taiwan to see something of the spirit and invention that has characterised British art during this exceptional period.

Of all the artforms in Britain, sculpture has commonly been regarded as the most surprising and innovative during the 20th Century. Beginning with the coloured sculptures of Anthony Caro (Sculpture Seven, 1961 and Month of May, 1963) and Phillip King (Rosebud, 1962 and Ripple, 1963), the exhibition opens on a radical note with works which rid sculpture of any association with objects and images from the outside world and which broke free of all that had gone before in British sculpture. The ability to adapt and incorporate new materials and technologies has been one of the motivating forces behind British sculpture, and the exhibition includes many key works in a wide range of media by successive generations of artists which have helped to re-define the language of sculpture: Barry Flanagan’s soft organic sculptures (Heap 4, 1967); early video ‘sculpture’ by Gilbert and George (Portrait of the Artists as Young Men; Gordon’s Makes us Drunk and In the Bush, all from 1972); Richard Long using photography, text and found materials to re-create his walks in the landscape (England, 1968 and Spring Circle, 1992); Tony Cragg (Canoe, 1982 and George and the Dragon, 1984), Bill Woodrow (Crow and Carrion, 1981 and Car Door, Armchair and Incident, 1981) and Sarah Lucas (Fuck Destiny, 2000), re-cycling and giving new life to everyday objects; Mona Hatoum filming the inside of her own body (Corps étranger, 1994). The exhibition concludes with a new installation by Richard Wilson (Room 921, Empress Hotel, 2001) specially commissioned for this occasion by the Taipei Fine Arts Museum.

Field Day has been selected and organised by Fang-Wei Chang, Curator, Taipei Fine Arts Museum, and Richard Riley, Exhibition Curator, Visual Arts, the British Council. A bilingual catalogue (Chinese and English) is being published by the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, with colour reproductions of all the works in the exhibition, biographies of the artists and newly commissioned texts by Fang-Wei Chang and Lewis Biggs, until recently Director of Tate Liverpool, now Director of the Liverpool Biennial.

Catalogue ISBN 957 02 8172 3

Collection Artist(s)

Glossary

  • Curator

    A person who creates exhibitions or who is employed to look after and research museum objects.

  • Installation

    An artwork comprised of many and various elements of miscellaneous materials (see mixed media), light and sound, which is conceived for and occupies an entire space, gallery or site. The viewer can often enter or walk around the installation. Installations may only exist as long as they are installed, but can be re-created in different sites. Installation art emerged in the 1960s out of Environmental Art (works of art which are three-dimensional environments), but it was not until the 1970s that the term came into common use and not until the late 1980s that artists started to specialise in this kind of work, creating a genre of ‘Installation Art’. The term can also be applied to the arrangement of selected art works in an exhibition.

  • Landscape

    Landscape is one of the principle genres of Western art. In early paintings the landscape was a backdrop for the composition, but in the late 17th Century the appreciation of nature for its own sake began with the French and Dutch painters (from whom the term derived). Their treatment of the landscape differed: the French tried to evoke the classical landscape of ancient Greece and Rome in a highly stylised and artificial manner; the Dutch tried to paint the surrounding fields, woods and plains in a more realistic way. As a genre, landscape grew increasing popular, and by the 19th Century had moved away from a classical rendition to a more realistic view of the natural world. Two of the greatest British landscape artists of that time were John Constable and JMW Turner, whose works can be seen in the Tate collection (www.tate.org.uk). There can be no doubt that the evolution of landscape painting played a decisive role in the development of Modernism, culminating in the work of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists . Since then its demise has often been predicted and with the rise of abstraction, landscape painting was thought to have degenerated into an amateur pursuit. However, landscape persisted in some form into high abstraction, and has been a recurrent a theme in most of the significant tendencies of the 20th Century. Now manifest in many media, landscape no longer addresses solely the depiction of topography, but encompasses issues of social, environmental and political concern.

  • Sculpture

    A three-dimensional work of art. Such works may be carved, modelled, constructed, or cast. Sculptures can also be described as assemblage, in the round, relief, and made in a huge variety of media. Contemporary practice also includes live elements, as in Gilbert & George 'Living Sculpture' as well as broadcast work, radio or sound sculpture.

  • Video

    Images recorded on videotape or on optical disc to be viewed on television screens, or projected onto screens. The medium through which these images are recorded and displayed.