Thomas Houseago

Hauser & Wirth, London
Acquired from the above by the present owner

London, Regent’s Park, Frieze Sculpture Park, Frieze, 2011
Norwich, Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, Thomas Houseago: Where The Wild Things Are, 2012

Thomas Houseago’s powerful sculptures are some of the most radical and idiosyncratic figurative works being created by a living artist. Taking the human figure as his primary subject is an act of defiant belief in how people can relate to sculptural objects through identification and natural instinct. In a lecture given in 2010 Houseago stated: ‘I’m just really interested in how – no. 1 – the body appears. What it’s like to look and live with human beings. I’m fascinated by that. And how you can express that’. His works possess a sense of urgency, and the artist has said that he wants his sculptures to have some of the spontaneity and freshness of drawing. The surfaces are therefore roughly worked, with the actual process of their creation fully evident in the finished piece, even after they have been cast into bronze. He has embraced the use of bronze as material because it allows him to create forms which are inherently vulnerable in the clay or plaster model, and would not survive as a sculpture for any length of time, but when cast in metal they are endowed with a imperviousness and natural monumentality which is at odds with the fragility of the original. Houseago stated: ‘I am fascinated by the act—whatever form it takes—of making art. And in a broad sense, by how an artist responds to the world and the action that occurs from that interaction…I wanted to get rid of the readymade and figure out what I looked like and how I reacted to the world’. Working in clay and plaster, both traditional materials, Houseago’s art is however boldly individual, yet he has acknowledged a vast variety of influences from Michelangelo and Brancusi to comic books and the flora and fauna of his adopted home, Los Angeles. These influences permeate his works, but some are more overt than others, for example the oversized hand of the present work seems to relate to that of Michelangelo’s David.

Brought up in Leeds during the miner’s strike, the violence and strife of those years has echoes in his own art. Sculptures like Hermaphrodite possess many contrasting, often conflicting elements. Menace and vulnerability are both present in the massive figures he creates.