Dame Elisabeth Frink (British 1930-1993) §
Sentinel III, circa 1960
£30,000
Auction: 30 April 2021 from 10:00 BST
Description
signed, bronze, unique edition
Dimensions
68cm high, 18.5cm wide (26.75in, 7.25in wide)
Footnote
Provenance:
Private Collection, UK from the 1960s and by descent.
Literature:
Ratusziniak, Annette (ed.), Elisabeth Frink Catalogue Raisonné of Sculpture 1947-93, Lund Humphries, 2013, p.74 for comparable examples.
This work has been registered with the Estate of the Artist and will be included in any future catalogue raisonné.
We would like to thank the Estate of Elizabeth Frink for their assistance in cataloguing the current work.
The male form was at the core of Elisabeth Frink’s sculptural practice. Having come from a younger generation so heavily smarted by the Second World War, she saw men’s nature as a root cause of war and the atrocities of warfare. Drawn to the male figure, yet equality repulsed by it she stated ‘I have focussed on the male, because to me he is a subtle combination of sensuality and strength with vulnerability’.
Out of the war a new generation of sculptors had grown, the ‘Geometry of Fear’ group, which included Lynn Chadwick, Kenneth Armitage, Eduardo Paolozzi and Reg Butler – all of whom were concerned with the post-war condition of the human form, and it is within this context that her work Sentinel sits. Warriors, sentinels, and helmeted heads inhabit Frink’s oeuvre in the late 1950s into the 1960s, using the male form as an instrument to express both aggression and vulnerability, starkly contrasting to the traditional notion of man as the ideal hero. Frink was subverting the natural order by reverting the age-long tradition of the artistic male gaze on the female form.