LONDON.- This year’s edition of Sotheby’s annual Beyond Limits show brings the searing abstract vision of post-war American art to the rolling hills of Derbyshire in a one-off American-themed exhibition. In one of the most iconic settings in Britain, monumental sculpture by some of the foremost post-War American artists have been brought together to celebrate a revolutionary moment where freedom of expression met with unprecedented scale and ambition.

The first prominent open-air exhibition devoted exclusively to American post-war sculpture in the United Kingdom, the outdoor show will trace the ways in which leading artists have boldly experimented with new materials and techniques – from Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art to the rise of Minimalism and Conceptual Art. This follows on from the zenith of enthusiasm for American art witnessed in Britain in the past two years – Abstract Expressionism and Jasper Johns at the Royal Academy to Ellsworth Kelly at Tate Liverpool and American Dream at the British Museum.

Artists featured include Richard Serra, Mark di Suvero, Beverly Pepper and Tony Smith among many others. Together, the works of this extraordinarily vibrant generation feed into an unfolding story of American art – with the rejection of traditional schooling and methods and the revolution in subject matter and scale.

Co-curators of the exhibition, Simon Stock, Sotheby’s Senior International Specialist and Allan Schwartzman, Chairman of Sotheby’s Fine Art Division, commented: ‘With the unfolding story of American art in the contemporary psyche, this year felt like the perfect moment for American sculpture to be put under the spotlight. Starting the trajectory with a moment of precise and powerful transition in the early Sixties, the exhibition explores how the American sculptors broke away from tradition – moving through abstraction to minimalism to pop art, all on a revolutionary scale. We are delighted to bring together the iconic voices in the history of the medium, in a display that explores their potent legacy.’

TONY SMITH
Source, steel painted black, 1967
A pioneer of American art, Tony Smith’s large-scale geometric forms represent some of the finest achievements in American post-war sculpture. He enlarged simple three-dimensional shapes to confer drama through scale. Smith was also drawn to a sense of order set alongside disorder, with a result that is both forbidding and beautiful.

Originally a painter, Smith became a full-time architect in the 1940s, and it wasn’t until the late 1950s that he began to make sculpture. Indeed, his first exhibition of these large-scale sculptures was in 1964 and just three years later he was illustrated on the cover of Time Magazine with the head caption ‘Master of the Monumentalists’.

This work is emblematic of Smith’s output: imposing in scale, multi-faceted and painted in his signature black finish. The title is drawn from an 1894 painting by Gustave Courbet, The Source of the Loue – a view of a rocky grotto at the source of a river in Eastern France, which Smith associated with the work of his Abstract Expressionist friends.

ROBERT MORRIS
Barrier, cast white painted steel, 1962
‘Simplicity of shape does not necessarily equate with simplicity of experience’
One of the earliest pieces in the exhibition, Barrier by Robert Morris signals an aesthetic and conceptual shift of seismic proportions, presenting something entirely new in the trajectory of post-war American sculpture. Morris was an early exponent of Minimalism, and one of its key theorists – setting forth a vision of art pared down to simple geometric shapes stripped of metaphorical associations. Minimalist sculpture is dependent on context and conditions, essentially upending the notion of the artwork as independent in and of itself. This interactive element is apparent in Morris’ works, as his ‘frameworks’ all interrogate the conventional relationship between both the frame and its hypothetical content and its surroundings.

Originally a painter of abstract landscapes, Morris moved to New York in 1960 and his work underwent a dramatic change as he began to create monumental, repeated geometric forms, devoid of figuration, surface texture, or expressive content. These works forced the viewer to consider the arrangement and scale of the forms themselves, and how perception shifted as one moved around them.

RICHARD SERRA
Lock, hot-rolled steel, 1976-77
One of the most influential artists in this field over the last half-century, Richard Serra has persistently and imaginatively challenged the conventions of traditional sculpture from his use of materials – and focus on their physical properties – to his involvement of the viewer.

Lock is one of just eleven large-scale outdoor steel sculptures that Serra made in the 1970s, formed of five separate elements that are not fused in any way – relying on the forces of gravity and a carfully balancing of the relative weights to achieve stability.

The process of viewing the sculpture demands a passage through and around the work, an experience that must take place as duration – therefore forcing the viewer to contemplate the passing of time. This concern is also apparent in Serra’s choice of materials, as the deliberate yet uncontrollable rusting of the steel displays its intrinsic properties and the marks of time.

Exhibited first at the Whitney Museum, New York in 1977, Lock made its second public appearance at the Frieze Sculpture Park in London in 2015.

JOEL SHAPIRO
Untitled, painted bronze, 2011
Weighing abstraction against figuration and balancing monumentality with agility in a seeming defiance of gravity itself, Untitled is a joyous expression of Joel Shapiro’s mature work.

Joel Shapiro’s explorations into the reconfiguration and repositioning of simple geometric form result in works that emanate movement and energy. A skilful colourist, he uses his command of different shades to alter the perceptions of a piece. This vibrantly painted bronze brings a striking accent of colour to the dramatic scenery of Chatsworth.

The artist’s early work was born from the Minimalist movement, and yet it expressed much of the artist’s own emotional state. Whilst minimalism was intended to be non-referential, Shapiro was interested in the powerful psychological aspects of art. Thus, his works strike a careful balance between representation and abstraction – achieving a delicate figuration that can be seen in this reclining figure. Yet, as per the crucial Minimalist tenet – it takes the viewer walking around the sculpture to bring the spectacle to life.

This October, Shapiro is to be honoured by the Storm King Art Center in New York. Chatsworth’s own Art Out Loud festival (22-24 September), will feature Shapiro in a talk reflecting on his 45-year career and the evolution of his work in the context of modern sculpture.

ROBERT INDIANA
One Through Zero, cor-ten steel, conceived in 1980, cast in 1991
Bursting onto the art scene in the 1960s as a precocious young talent, Robert Indiana was a leading proponent of the new generation of Pop artists who overturned conventions and eclipsed their established contemporaries in New York.

Indiana’s assemblages resonated with Americans as an abstract exploration of American identity – speaking of a specific time and place in American history. He derived inspiration – and material – from road signs, route numbers and billboards, all of which were a ubiquitous part of his native mid-Western landscape. Indeed, although he was originally born Robert Clark, he changed his surname to align with his home state of Indiana.

Individual numbers have served as a central feature of Indiana’s repertoire from early on, with a huge amount of significance placed on numbers, frequency and repetition. The root of their personal significance lay in the artist’s childhood, as by the age of seventeen, he had lived in twenty-one different homes.

In its linear progression, the 1 to 9 signifies the sweep of a human lifespan, with 0 the final point. This series of 6-foot-high steel numbers will make their second public outing at Chatsworth, where their distinctive rusty hue brilliantly contrasts with the verdant surroundings and picks up on the concept of found and re-appropriated materials.

LOUISE NEVELSON
Tropical Night Disc, welded aluminium painted black, 1975
Leading 20th-century sculptor Louise Nevelson brought the concept of installation art firmly to the foreground of American sculpture. She explored the streets around her studio for inspiration and would use old bits of furniture and pieces of wood, painting these in a unifying, monochromatic colour. Standing nearly three metres high, Tropical Night Disc – with its consuming black colour and disparate angular elements – marks the dramatic culmination of Nevelson’s experiments with form.

Facing searing sexism throughout her career, Nevelson railed against gendered stereotyping – a firm believer that art reflected the individual and not masculine-feminine labels. She was fundamental in redefining the possibilities for women in art, a key proponent of the Feminist Art Movement in 1970s America.

SOL LEWITT
Three-Sided Pyramid, baked enamel on aluminium, 1991
Sol LeWitt was pivotal in the creation of the new radical aesthetic of the 1960s, taking the simplification of form as the primary concern of his work. LeWitt was influenced both by the tradition of Constructivist art and his fellow Minimalist painters, yet his aesthetic was one of Conceptual art. Indeed, he preferred the term ‘structure’ over ‘sculpture’, drawing himself in line with the history of architecture. LeWitt’s core belief in the artist as a generator of ideas – crossing the boundaries of science, mathematics and philosophy – was instrumental in the transition from the modern to the postmodern era.

A majestic aluminium work painted in white enamel, Three-Sided Pyramid reduces the geometric shape to a contemporary understanding of its essential form, emphasising the three-dimensional structure. Borrowing forms found in mathematics and ancient civilisations, the pyramid evokes ancient Egyptian architecture and the ziggurat formations – harking back to the first complex architectural structures.

CLAES OLDENBURG & COOSJE VAN BRUGGEN
Leaning Fork with Meatball and Spaghetti II, fibreglass painted with urethane, 1994
Claes Oldenburg is one of the most seminal figures of the ground-breaking Pop art movement, one which contravened the principles of the dominant art movement in the 1950s – Abstract Expressionism. The reintroduction of identifiable forms in artworks was a major shift in the direction of Modern art, and Oldenburg was at the centre of the vanguard – creating object-based works executed in bold, exuberant colours.

In 1970, Oldenburg met fellow artist and curator Coosje van Bruggen, instigating a powerful professional and romantic partnership. Together, they created sculptures that incorporated humour with a sincere sentiment – often musing on contemporary self-identification and consumerism. They frequently enlarged common objects, whose subsequent scale and incongruous setting in a public space would provide comical entertainment – an idea was unheard of at the time.