FLORENCE.- Stuart Lochhead Sculpture is now presenting a collection of Giambologna sculptures in The Alchemist’s Laboratory for London Art Week 2023. Returning to this summer’s London Art Week, Stuart Lochhead Sculpture presents The Alchemist’s Laboratory: Giambologna’s Forge in Florence, an exhibition reflecting the unique atmosphere of 16th century Florence by focusing on one of the city’s most illustrious inhabitants, the sculptor Giambologna.

Few European cities have captured the public imagination like Florence in the late sixteenth century. Under the rule of the Medici family, the city became an open-air workshop for painters, architects, goldsmiths, and sculptors.

Giambologna’s forge changed the state of metals, pouring together contemporary religious sentiment and pagan mythology, and infusing artistic life into inert matter. Sculptors from all over Europe took part in this transformative process, learning from his skills, continuing to cast his models for over two centuries and thus testifying to the longevity of his creative strength.

Stuart Lochhead Sculpture will present a selection of five bronze models by the master during the summer edition of London Art Week 2023. The pieces include a rare model of the ‘Striding Mars’ and of ‘Hercules and the Centaur’, amongst others. The works are sold as a group, which has been assembled over two decades by an important private American collector. As such, the exhibition affords the unique opportunity to secure at once a ‘complete’ collection that conveys the essence of a city that defined the course of European art history.

The exhibition will take place in the first-floor gallery space on 35 Bury Street St James’s.

Having graduated from the Courtauld Institute of Art in 1994, Stuart has been working in the field of sculpture handling some of the greatest works to come to the market and enriching the collections of the most distinguished collectors and museums.

Stuart has curated a multitude of exhibitions in London and New York. He worked alongside the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford; the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge and the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam on loan shows of their collections of Renaissance and Baroque bronzes and supervised the accompanying catalogues. He was instrumental in creating London Sculpture Week, a commercial gallery initiative now a part of London Art Week. He was a trustee of the Public Sculpture and Monuments Association for 10 years and sat on the Editorial Board of the Sculpture Journal. He was Chair of the Courtauld Association for 7 years. The Courtauld is an institution he is a passionate supporter of. He currently sits as a member of the Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art and Objects of Cultural Interest.

In recent years, Stuart has sold an important bust of Georges Marechal by François Girardon to the Château de Versailles; a rare sculpture by Rodin to the Philadelphia Museum of Art; a ceramic portrait mask of Victor Hugo and a life-size portrait of the couturier Charles Worth by Émile Friant to the Musée d'Orsay; and a rediscovered masterpiece of Why Born Enslaved! by Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux to the Cleveland Museum of Art.