Exhibitions

The relationship between sculpture and photography has been the subject of increased attention in exhibitions and publications in recent years. Drawing on Sculpture looks afresh at this issue through the subtle ways in which drawing has mediated this relationship, allowing artists to use the flexibility of a two-dimensional medium to define and describe sculpture.

Artists have used photographs for many purposes, but this exhibition focuses on their use as a drawing board. It begins with Rodin, whose innovative use of photography is now well known, and comes up to the present day, with works by Hew Locke, whose graffiti-like over-drawing references both Rodin’s sculptures and Rodin’s graphic interventions.

Drawing on Sculpture includes around thirty works, highlighting the different reasons for sculptors to draw on photographs. These drawings provide a visual commentary on how sculptors think about their work and explore colour, outline, surface, layering, scale and meaning. In some cases their annotations are practical - dealing with issues of enlargement or with problem areas - while other modifications extend to the complete recontextualisation of the original work. The drawn line is also seen to be used as a way of animating the sculpture, as with the works of Paul Neagu or Tony Cragg, in which the line whips round the static form as if it were the wind. In this hinterland between two and three dimensions, impossible sculptures are allowed to exist.

Based primarily on the collections of Leeds Museums and Galleries and the Henry Moore Institute archive, the exhibition also includes a small number of historic and contemporary loans. Other artists on display include Gilbert Bayes, A.H Gerrard, Ivor Roberts-Jones, Ernest Gillick, Gilbert Ledward, Bernard Schottlander, Willi Baumeister, Henry Moore, and Bernard Meadows.

Drawing on Sculpture complements the exhibition in the Institute’s main galleries - Towards a New Laocoon - with its similar focus on the relationship between line and mass. The sculptors Eduardo Paolozzi and Tony Cragg are represented in both.