Exhibitions

For the past fifteen years Stephen Cox has spent much of his time abroad, working in Italy from 1979, in India since 1985 and in Egypt from 1988. The rationale for Stephen Cox's artistic pilgrimage can be related to the history of the Grand Tour. Cox mirrors, some two hundred years on, the preoccupation of artists from Northern Europe with the exotic which lay beyond the Alps, then beyond the mediteranean and finally accross Asia. What chracterises Cox's activity is, however, not limited to the passive observation of other cultures but involves working amongst carvers in other traditions, as a way of getting physically and spiritually close to the origins of our own aesthetic sensibilitites. It provides a way of connecting with the history of art whilst he is making work that is throughly contemporary.

In 1989, Cox extracted stones from the Imperial Porphyry Quarries in the eastern mountains of Egypt for a sculpture commissioned by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office as a gift to the Egyptian people for the New Opera House in Cairo. Cox is the first sculptor since antiquity to have had access to the Imperial Porphyry quarries, and perhaps the first since the Rennaissance to have carved its rare stone, which once supplied the monuments of Rome and Egypt.

Recently, whilst working on this exhibition in Egypt, Cox made a reconnaisance trip to the southern-most deserts of Egypt to determine the feasibility of extracting stone from the quarries of Cephren, the builder of the great Pryamids. These quarries have not been used since the funerary statures of the great pharoah were carved. It is hoped that, during the exhibition, an expedition will be mounted under the auspices of the Egyptian Ministery of Culpture and the Egyptain Geologicial Mapping and Survey Authority with a view to making a survey of the site, prior to the extraction of stone for a new series of sculptures.

Cox's last major exhibitions in Britain, at the Tate Gallery in 1986 and at Artsite Bath in 1988, investigated his sculpture made amongst the carvers of south India. At the Henry Moore Institute, his exhibition will contrast large works made recently in Egypt from some of the hardest stone known to art, with works made at the beginning of his career as a sculptor using everyday material, such as plaster, in the spirit of Arte Povera and Minimalism.