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Lot Essay
When considering Armitage's People in the Wind, 1950-51, Antony Gormley wrote of the present work:
'The fragile nature of that realisation continues with Friends Walking. Here, the registering membrane has been radicalised further: rather than an allusion to cloaks flapping, we simply have a wall out of which arms cross and legs are impressed - legs that fail to connect with any one head. Here there are eight legs, three heads and five arms. By dismissing or disregarding any physiological logic, Armitage escapes both the weight of the monumental and any kind of memorialising, in spite of being associated with the post-war years of recovery and a context of ration books and austerity. This work marvellously evokes the collective experience of being, held between sky and earth, and conscious of the horizon: the solidarity of being exposed in space together with others. I find this work the most profound and challenging of all these early works because the wall now tells the story of intimacy and distance begun three years earlier. The striations that run across this piece seem to evoke the strata in rock, the lines of a rising tide and multiple horizons. So the allusions to landscape is now embodied. Legs are like tree trunks, holding the potential of a world registered by a body that is no longer reacting to it, as in People in the Wind, but folding arms as if to embrace and internalise it.
'Armitage seems to have an instinctive understanding of sculpture's ability to be a thing in the world and yet allude to the most fugitive aspects of human experience, the most relevant being that of our relationship to space and the elements' (A. Gormley (foreword), in J. Scott and C. Milburn, The Sculpture of Kenneth Armitage, London, 2016, p. 7).
There is another cast of Friends Walking in the British Council Collection. Artist's records suggest that Friends Walking was cast by Galizia, in no more than an edition of 6. Cast number 5 was exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 1958, and was owned by the photographer Douglas Glass.
'The fragile nature of that realisation continues with Friends Walking. Here, the registering membrane has been radicalised further: rather than an allusion to cloaks flapping, we simply have a wall out of which arms cross and legs are impressed - legs that fail to connect with any one head. Here there are eight legs, three heads and five arms. By dismissing or disregarding any physiological logic, Armitage escapes both the weight of the monumental and any kind of memorialising, in spite of being associated with the post-war years of recovery and a context of ration books and austerity. This work marvellously evokes the collective experience of being, held between sky and earth, and conscious of the horizon: the solidarity of being exposed in space together with others. I find this work the most profound and challenging of all these early works because the wall now tells the story of intimacy and distance begun three years earlier. The striations that run across this piece seem to evoke the strata in rock, the lines of a rising tide and multiple horizons. So the allusions to landscape is now embodied. Legs are like tree trunks, holding the potential of a world registered by a body that is no longer reacting to it, as in People in the Wind, but folding arms as if to embrace and internalise it.
'Armitage seems to have an instinctive understanding of sculpture's ability to be a thing in the world and yet allude to the most fugitive aspects of human experience, the most relevant being that of our relationship to space and the elements' (A. Gormley (foreword), in J. Scott and C. Milburn, The Sculpture of Kenneth Armitage, London, 2016, p. 7).
There is another cast of Friends Walking in the British Council Collection. Artist's records suggest that Friends Walking was cast by Galizia, in no more than an edition of 6. Cast number 5 was exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 1958, and was owned by the photographer Douglas Glass.