Exhibitions

This autumn’s major exhibition at the Henry Moore Institute brings to light the rich symbolic language of sculpture’s most familiar material. While many exhibitions and catalogues are devoted to bronzes, few examine the meaning of the material itself. Presented in the Institute’s main galleries this show provides an illuminating study of bronze from antiquity to the present.

From early times bronze had close connections with magical and supernatural powers. Metals were linked to planets and to deities - copper to Venus, tin to Jupiter - and bronze as an alloy represented the alchemists’ powers of union. As such, Mercury, the god of exchange, characterises the theme of this show, which is all about transformation.

The exhibition opens with the alchemist’s mortar and literally turns it upside down to provide moulds for the bells which represented such a huge investment on the part of early modern communities. Bronze-workers often embodied a range of different roles; they were not only alchemists and bell-founders, but also gold-workers and weapons-engineers. The functional objects in our exhibition represent vessels which would have contained water, oil, perfume or gunpowder; they provided sounds and sights and smells.

The interchangeability of fame and notoriety is well represented by a material which could be melted down and re-fashioned. Cannon became statues; statues became cannon. This show picks up on the fickle fortunes of fame, on the use of bronze as protective armour, and on the damage which has been done to the bronze body of the ruler throughout time.

Though bronze may be seen as a traditional if not an old-fashioned material, it is still very much in evidence in contemporary work, often transformed in its appearance, but nevertheless present. The exhibition closes by touching on the continued magic exercised by a material which seems to represent, at one and the same time, the power of life and death.