LONDON.- Pangolin London is presenting an exhibition focusing on the prints of celebrated sculptor Lynn Chadwick. Featuring screenprints and lithographs created throughout his illustrious career, the exhibition highlights Chadwick’s adept control of line and form in two dimensions and his skill at creating strong graphic images where he could experiment with colour and composition.
This is the first exhibition of its kind in London and explores the depth of Lynn Chadwick’s visual thinking by presenting his print oeuvre alongside related sculptures.
“Throughout his career, Chadwick frequently revisited earlier themes, exploring and refining them across media. Drawing and printmaking provided him with an intimate, immediate way to continue his visual thought process, distilling sculptural ideas to their purest forms.” – Rungwe Kingdon
In 1956, the year Lynn Chadwick represented Britain at the Venice Biennale, he chose to exhibit as many drawings as he did sculptures. This was also the year Chadwick first produced a print for sale. Created to accompany a monograph by Swiss publisher Jürg Janett, with a text by art historian Herbert Read, Chadwick produced a limited-edition lithograph, Teddy Boy and Girl (1956), derived from the 1955 welded sculpture of the same name. This lithograph - with its pair of angular figures in pleated coats - brings out the sculpture’s fashion-plate quality and its title references and quietly celebrates the emergence of the first distinctive post-war youth subculture of the 1950s.
Chadwick’s graphic work carries the same visual language as his sculpture with their sharp edges and triangular, spindly limbs. Figures such as Standing Figure (Elektra) (1969) draw direct parallels with his sculptures, often taking the form of standing pairs, seated couples, winged figures and sentinel-like forms. In his earlier prints, the use of more muted colours and tones allowed Chadwick to soften his skeletal forms and anthropomorphic abstractions. In comparison, his later prints - such as Grand Central (1972) - feature striped and wave-like compositions with use of bold colour fields which speak to the more colourful and graphic turn of the 1960s and 1970s. In most instances, the prints decidedly depart from the sculptures with his experimentation of colour and texture, moving beyond the earthy tones of iron and bronze.
Unlike many of his contemporaries, Chadwick rooted his practice in construction rather than modelling. He primarily used the process of drawing and printmaking to explore the sculpture he had made after its creation rather than to plan it in advance. The medium of print provided him with an immediate way of appraising the sculptural forms he had created, perhaps inspiring new directions in form. Looking back, it’s interesting to observe his progression of visual language running concurrently with his sculpture. He experimented with printmaking throughout his career, from personal Christmas cards to editions made for exhibitions, making some sixty-eight lithograph editions between 1950 and 1976. This reflects the nature of lithography, his most frequently used method of printmaking, where every print is individually hand-crafted ensuring small editions and typically signed by the artist in pencil. As a result, they are now extremely desirable and offer an excellent acquisition for the first-time buyer or seasoned Chadwick collector alike.
Beyond introducing his artworks to a different collector base, Chadwick appears to have learnt something from the translation of his figures from sculpture to print. Mass translated into line, volume into colour and shade and space into composition are eloquent qualities of his multiples. The Complete Prints offers an opportunity to encounter Chadwick’s work through the primary medium of paper, where the two-dimensional output functions not as an end in itself but as an exercise in balance, structure and kinetic possibility. This selection of prints - with their deft draughtsmanship and directness of image-making - offer valuable insights into Chadwick’s sculpture and artistic practice.
Pangolin London presents this exhibition in conjunction with the major retrospective Lynn Chadwick at Houghton Hall in Norfolk (2 May–4 October 2026). The Complete Prints is a collaboration with Gallery Pangolin, Gloucestershire, and the Lynn Chadwick Estate.
Lynn Chadwick CBE RA (1914, London – 2003, Gloucestershire) was one of the leading British sculptors of his generation. Without a formal education in the arts, it was instead his training and career as an architectural draughtsman that gave Chadwick his technical and disciplined introduction to drawing. In 1946, Chadwick took the decision to concentrate on his own work and moved to Gloucestershire where he rented a small cottage and delighted in his newfound freedom of expression. From the very first mobile, Chadwick dutifully kept a notebook in which he catalogued each piece with a ‘shorthand’ sketch listing its dimensions and materials to help with identification. He began his sculptural career making mobile constructions for building trade fairs and it was the resulting success of these early mobiles and stabiles, two of which were shown on the South Bank during the Festival of Britain in 1951, that first allowed him to seriously consider becoming a freelance sculptor.
Chadwick’s unique approach was based on construction rather than modelling. First, he welded a linear armature or skeleton onto which he applied a skin, building up the surface to a solid form which would then be cast in bronze. By beginning with an abstract form or ‘space frame’ and investing it with an allusive vitality, Chadwick’s working process is the reverse of most traditional approaches. The results are equally original, and each work has a carefully considered ‘attitude’ communicated through stance, texture and finish.
Speaking on the process of making art, Chadwick noted:
“It seems to me that art must be the manifestation of some vital force coming from the dark, caught by the imagination and translated by the artist’s ability and skill… whatever the final stage, the force behind it is… indivisible.”
Chadwick first came to international prominence in 1952 when he was included in the British Council’s New Aspects of British Sculpture exhibition for the 1952 Venice Biennale alongside Kenneth Armitage, Reg Butler, Bernard Meadows, Geoffrey Clarke, Robert Adam, William Turnbull and Eduardo Paolozzi, a group whose work was labelled by the critic Herbert Read as ‘the geometry of fear’. Representing Britain with a solo exhibition in the 1956 Venice Biennale, he went on to win the International Prize for Sculpture, beating the established favourite, Alberto Giacometti. At 42, he was the youngest sculptor to receive the prestigious prize. Many honours and awards followed this period, and his work was widely collected both privately and by major institutions globally.
In 1958, Chadwick bought an impressive but dilapidated medieval manor house outside Stroud, Gloucestershire. Blessed with space but also faced with the challenges of maintaining a large old building, Chadwick was able to explore creating larger works that could interact with the landscape, later establishing his own personal sculpture park. These large works bridged figurative and geometric abstraction, with the motif of a ‘Couple’ or ‘Watchers’ allowing him to explore the relationships between faceless figures through body language. Another motif to which he was drawn was that of the ‘Beast’, which reflected the broader anxieties in the post-war age. In 1964, he was awarded a CBE and in 2001 was elected a Royal Academician.
During the 1990s, Chadwick revisited his signature beasts, recapturing the spirit of his earlier creations in polished stainless-steel panels. During this period, he also returned to the mobile, this time expanding it to a monumental scale. After a career spanning fifty years, he completed his final sculpture, Ace of Diamonds, in 1996. A major retrospective of his work was held at Tate Britain, London, in 2003. Sadly, Chadwick passed away five months before it opened.
