Phyllida Barlow once said that sculpting should be adventurous. “It’s almost on the verge of being out of my control,” she said. Almost. No matter the chaos, he was still in charge. The central dilemma of Phyllida Barlow: Unscripted, which has just opened at Hauser & Wirth Somerset, is what happens when an artist is scheduled to have an exhibition but is no longer with us. This is the first major survey exhibition of Barlow’s work since the retrospective of Barlow’s death last March.
Curated by former Tate Modern director Frances Morris together with Barlow’s studio team, the exhibition opens with six striking works from forty different decades. These are moderately placed, moderately sized pieces that you can easily move around, allowing you to make connections between Barlow’s work and the art history that flows so easily from his fingers. It’s a bit of an “if you know, you know” kind of setup, which is a shame. Still, it’s exciting to see these important Barlows up close.
The feeling is more ‘What would Phyllida do?’ Rather than ‘what Phyllida did next’
There’s Shedmesh, a wooden and knotted canvas cube from 1975 that resembles 1960s minimalism and arte povera. 1994’s Object for the Television features a pair of white rabbit ears atop a vintage monitor on coasters that pay homage to all the other rabbit-obsessed artists (Brâncuși, Miró, Jean Arp, as well as Jeff Koons and Barry Flanagan). and those obsessed with televisions (Nam June Paik’s Magnet TV comes to mind). Eva Hesse, meanwhile, appears among the loops and nodes of 2011’s Untitled: Tapecoils 2: a wall-mounted bracket that holds tubes made of tape, like the electrical tape some couriers use to cover their bikes to make them less expensive. It attracts the attention of thieves.
Things get even more complicated in the next large room. The point here – somehow! – Tackle Barlow’s comprehensive site-specific installations without Barlow. This is the part of his work that most people will be familiar with; Large mounds and mounds of material occupied larger and larger areas with such emphasis that this led critics to use ever more extreme words. The work was “crazy”, “wildly ambitious”, “impossible”, “semi-architectural”, “colossal”, “monumental”, “indelible” and – once – simply “wow”.
To avoid copying or parodying a Barlow installation, Morris used Barlow’s habits (recycling, repairing, opening paths, using the ceiling, blocking the entrance) as methods. Morris says the pieces were repaired by “tapping the plaster and paint”. A wall of colored wood panels, part of Barlow’s installation Folly for the British pavilion at the 2017 Venice Biennale, blocks the entrance. Lumps similar to those seen at the Arsenale in 2013 hang from the ceiling. Meanwhile, 21 room-high, gut-like arches, first shown in New York in 2012, fill the opposite end.
Despite this appealing curatorial approach, it’s still a roomful of Barlows. But it’s more of a “What would Phyllida do?” More space than “what does Phyllida do next?” I have a sudden urge to knock things over. This is an artist who makes work by drilling, poking, prodding, filling, pulling, pouring and letting it all crash to see how gravity can help. How could anyone else find that moment of stillness, of truth, that he would find?
Up close, the cloth-wrapped rods, the swarm of blatantly painted For Rent signs and the floral moons swinging on inner tube chains are as exciting as ever. But all he looks like is a dull look, as if he is not breathing. Outside, on the contrary, everything is really like that. There are red chairs jutting out of an outbuilding and a William Kentridge-like megaphone on a stalk in one corner of the farm.
Painting was a skill Barlow didn’t think he had
Most notably, there is Prank, Barlow’s latest series of sculptures for a New York park due in 2023. This is a very simple and coherent body of work. Seven rusted metal structures rise on a windy route on the landscaped hillside of Oudolf Field behind the gallery spaces. Each has a fluffy white rabbit-like shape, perched on an edge or corner in mid-motion. They look like children playing.
The show also features uplifting footage of Barlow. A series of relatively small sculptures, about the size of a human head or heart, made during lockdown, still promise worlds to explore, as do a series of small paintings in acrylic on canvas. Painting was a skill Barlow thought he didn’t have, but that’s exactly what he planned to use for this show.
When Barlow returned from Venice in 2017 – surely a high point in any artist’s career – he was in a state of flux. She would later explain that this was not exactly a crisis. Just she had learned so much. She was 72 years old. I wish the art world had started paying attention to this issue decades ago.
• Phyllida Barlow: Unscripted is at Hauser & Wirth Somerset until January 5, 2025.