Exhibitions

Works spanning 250 years by over 20 artists, including Alexander Calder, Anthony Caro, Richard Deacon, Jacob Epstein, Henri Gaudier-Breska, Cathy de Monchaux, Jospeh Nollekens, Eduardo Paolozzi and Louis Francois Roubiliac.

Leeds Museums and Galleries have an outstanding collection of sculpture, housed in three galleries: the City Art Gallery, Temple Newsam and Lotherton Hall. The first exhibition of 1998 in the Henry Moore Institute celebrated these collections, and the special focus on sculpture which has been fostered in Leeds by means of the legacy of Henry Moore, whose centenary fell in 1998.

The exhibition was visual rather than historical, taking a fresh look at sculptures which might have become all too familiar. It mixed works from different dates and periods, focussing on making comparisions by means of similarites and differences in line, volume and materials.

Accompanied by drawings and studies from the archive in the Henry Moore Institute, the selection of sculptures was both historical and modern, and demonstrated the quality and range of the Leeds' collections, as well as the way in which assistance from the Henry Moore Foundation has helped to build the collections that complement each other for the purposes of study and display.

The title of this display was taken from the book Kandinsky wrote in 1926: a classic educational text for the artist, and a demonstration of ways of seeing. This was reflected in the exhibition layout: pages of drawings from sculptor's notebook - sculptures in line - covered the walls as if back in the studio. works in iron and bronze - drawings in space - took flight in the high central gallery of the Institute, winding their way up to Alexander Calder's masterly 'Chicago Black' mobile of 1948. Eleven busts, spanning 250 years, highlighted the treatment of the human head in marble and bronze; the human profile indicating the transitition from point and line to plane.