Collections

Opening in November 2012, Polychromies: Surface, Light and Colour takes place across the newly refurbished Sculpture Galleries of Leeds Art Gallery. Following a substantial Arts Council Renaissance National Programme grant, this display celebrates and showcases the excellence of the Leeds Museums and Galleries sculpture collection. The display unfolds across all of the Sculpture Galleries over the next year.

Sculpture has often been considered in opposition to painting, as concerned with form and not with tone and colour. However, all sculpture is coloured in some way, whether it is inherent to the material or applied over the top and has surface effects, revealed by light, which are integral to the perception of the work.

The central display focuses on qualities of surface in bronze, marble and stone sculpture, highlighting embedded, applied, reflected and environmental colour in sculptures that are not generally considered as polychromatic. Works from the Leeds Museums and Galleries collection include sculptures by Antonio Canova, Auguste Rodin, Alfred Gilbert, John Skeaping, Barry Hart and Elisabeth Frink. These narrate the development of figure sculpture in the round from the early nineteenth century onwards, examining how the highly fragmented surface filled with incidents  radically mobilises both the body and imagination of the viewer.

A second gallery examines the relationship between colour and abstraction, focusing on the development of a visual language where colours, lines and planes are the basic components. This display extends from two into three dimensions, and from static images into kinetic constructions. Included here are paintings by Bridget Riley, Richard Smith and Ron Wilman, prints, drawings and collages by Kenneth Martin, Neville Boden and Keith Arnatt, and sculptures by Marcel Duchamp, Naum Gabo, Victor Pasmore, Barry Martin, Francis Morland and George Meyrick.

The third part of the display takes as its starting point three framed miniature wax portraits from the first half of the nineteenth century by George Bullock, Samuel Percy and Richard Cockle Lucas. Their place within the artistic canon lies somewhere between sculpture and painting and fine art and collectable curiosity. Each has been carved and modelled out of coloured wax. This gallery looks more broadly at the idea of three dimensional pictures, enclosed and fragmented bodies and at colour as a physical material for sculpture. Other works on display include sculptures by Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Helen Chadwick, Eileen Agar, John Davies and Anya Gallaccio and a film by Jennifer West.

Polychromies: Surface, Light and Colour has been devised by the Henry Moore Institute in collaboration with 2011 Henry Moore Institute Fellow, Dr Gülru Çakmak (University of Massachusetts, Amherst) and co-curated by Sophie Raikes (Assistant Curator, Collections) and Pavel S. Pyś (Exhibitions and Displays Curator).

Incarnadine No.248 Estate Emulsion paint kindly supplied by Farrow & Ball.