LONDON.- Pangolin London is presenting Modern Sculptors, an exhibition bringing together important works by artists who helped shape the development of British and European sculpture from the mid-twentieth century onward.
On view in the gallery’s main space through October 31, 2026, the exhibition spans more than six decades and traces a period of intense experimentation in which sculptors moved away from established monument traditions, embraced abstraction, and explored new possibilities in both ancient and industrial materials.
At the center of the exhibition is a generation shaped by the social, political and cultural upheavals of the Second World War and its aftermath. Kenneth Armitage, Reg Butler, Lynn Chadwick, Geoffrey Clarke and Bernard Meadows came to international prominence at the 1952 Venice Biennale, where their work became associated with Herbert Read’s influential phrase "the geometry of fear."
Their sculpture reflected the anxieties of an uncertain age while also introducing new approaches to form, material and the human figure. Across the exhibition, bodies appear modelled, fragmented, mechanized and transformed, while selected paintings and drawings reveal the visual thinking that underpinned these sculptural languages.
Material and process play a central role throughout the presentation. Works demonstrate how artists challenged traditional casting and fabrication techniques through forged iron, cast aluminium, welded steel and stove enamel. Rather than presenting a single linear history, the exhibition emphasizes connections and tensions among individual practices, showing how each artist developed a distinct vocabulary within the broader postwar transformation of sculpture.
Featured artists include Kenneth Armitage, Ralph Brown, Reg Butler, Geoffrey Clarke, Elisabeth Frink, George Fullard, John Hoskin, Bryan Kneale, Bernard Meadows, Breon O’Casey, Charlotte Mayer, Eduardo Paolozzi, Olivier Strebelle and William Tucker.
Among the highlights is Eduardo Paolozzi’s Vulcan from 1998, a rare original plaster model measuring two meters high. The work served as the blueprint for Paolozzi’s monumental seven-meter bronze commission of the same subject, now in Edinburgh. Reimagining the Roman god of fire and metalworking as a figure that is half-man and half-machine, Paolozzi turned the mythological character into an emblem of the industrial age.
The sculpture also carried personal resonance for Paolozzi, who repeatedly returned to Vulcan as a figure through which he could explore the intersections of mythology, technology, labor and artistic identity. The exaggerated foot refers to Vulcan’s legendary lameness, while the hammer held in his hand reinforces the god’s association with making and metalwork.
Another key work is Geoffrey Clarke’s Embryo I from 1962, made from aluminium and glass. Clarke became known for his experimentation with industrial materials and for developing an innovative method of casting aluminium from models carved in expanded polystyrene.
While he is widely associated with monumental public commissions, including his work for Coventry Cathedral, Embryo I brings together two of his central interests: stained glass and sculpture. The circular work was created in the same year as his Crown of Thorns and Flying Cross for Coventry and relates to an experimental window he designed for architect Frankland Dark in 1956.
George Fullard’s 1960 bronze Head offers a more psychologically charged presence. Fullard grew up in a working-class Sheffield mining family shaped by socialist politics, and his wartime experiences had a lasting impact on his work. He narrowly survived the explosion of his tank at Monte Cassino during the Second World War and was left with permanent physical scars.
In Head, Fullard rejects classical proportions in favor of a raw, expressionistic treatment of the figure. Its agitated surface evokes bodily damage, survival and memories of wartime destruction. Fullard’s work is now represented in national collections including Tate and the Arts Council.
Also included is Charlotte Mayer’s Wall from 1968, a unique stove-enamelled steel sculpture that exemplifies the exhibition’s wider interest in how postwar artists expanded the possibilities of sculptural materials and fabrication.
Through these works and others, Modern Sculptors presents postwar sculpture not as a unified movement but as a field of experimentation shaped by uncertainty, technological change and new ideas about the body, material and monumentality.
Modern Sculptors is on view at Pangolin London through October 31, 2026.
