‘PLASTER!’ @ Frieze Masters
Presented as a part of Stand Out, a specially curated section by Luke Syson for London’s Frieze Masters, PLASTER! by Stuart Lochhead Sculpture investigates the medium of plaster as an innovative tool used by artists throughout history to record their artistic vision.
Installation view of PLASTER! at the Stuart Lochhead Sculpture booth at Frieze Masters (13-17 October 2021), London. Source: Stuart Lochhead Sculpture.
Traditionally overlooked by the market, plaster has served as one of the more versatile mediums by enabling artists to test and expand upon their technical abilities in sculpture. The exhibition brings together the work of Lorenzo Ghiberti, Auguste Rodin, Mária Bartuszová, and Rachel Whiteread, to name just a few, in order to explore the infinite possibilities of this frequently misunderstood medium.
Installation view of PLASTER!. Photo by Carlisle Berkley.
The first stop on the exhibition’s timeline is the fifteenth century with Early Renaissance master Lorenzo Ghiberti’s Madonna and Child. The work marks an almighty strong start and a personal favourite to view. The polychromed stucco sculpture, which has retained most of its original polychromy, is a testament to the artist’s skill as a sculptor and as a painter—for which he is lesser-known. Madonna and Child were prominent subjects in fifteenth-century relief sculpture and Ghiberti’s composition celebrates the Virgin as the ideal mother. His romantic and realistic handling of paint emphasizes its portrayal of humanity and love for which the scene widely appealed to Renaissance collectors. Plaster does not always have its white appearance - its colour can be easily concealed or altered by tinting to resemble bronze or terra-cotta. That said, Ghiberti eventually won the commission for the doors of the Florence baptistery over another Renaissance master and was the first artist in Florence to perfect modelling in clay as it became central to the production of bronzes. The Madonna and Child exhibited by Stuart Lochhead is a true testament to the artist’s skill and constitutes a critical reflection on how the medium of plaster enabled the practice of Renaissance masters and greatly influenced the technical achievements of bronze sculpture.
François Rude, Head of the Old Warrior, modelled ca. 1835, cast 19th century. Bronze. 63.5 × 31.8 × 32.4 cm. Source: Stuart Lochhead Sculpture.
Moving into the nineteenth century, Francois Rude’s bronze bust Head of the Old Warrior is strikingly evocative. After the popularity of his relief sculptures for the Arc de Triomphe, Rude was commissioned to make replicas of his famous figures to meet the demands of French collectors. As a result, there are now many extant examples of his Head of the Old Warrior in museum collections around the world. The incredible detail and emotion of subjects captured in his bronze casts eventually came to be widely admired, even catching the eye of the King of France. However, it was the medium of plaster that allowed for its wider dissemination. The work has subsequently assumed its status as one of the most recognizable and captivating three-dimensional images of its time.
Auguste Rodin, Bacchantes Embracing (Bacchantes s'enlaçant), possibly before 1896; cast after 1967. Bronze. 38.1 × 38.1 × 27.9 cm. Source: Stuart Lochhead Sculpture.
Generally considered the founder of modern sculpture, Auguste Rodin also regarded plaster as essential to his practice. In fact, it was his preferred means of artistic expression. He saw the making of sculpture as a collaborative process and the commercial success of his work relied upon the ability to produce multiples. Plaster casting was essential to capturing the same spontaneity of his clay models and the production of several plaster casts of the originals enabled him to create a number of different versions and new figurative combinations. This technique often helped him address compositional problems that he encountered when creating new work, thus resulting in the creation of some of the most challenging compositions of the era without inflicting damage to the originals. PLASTER! highlights multiple examples of Rodin’s work paired alongside that of Joseph Carriès and Thèodore Gericault in order to showcase how the group influenced and challenged one another to stretch the technical capacity of the medium.
Maria Bartuszová, Untitled, 1985. Source: The Estate of Maria Bartuszová, Košice and Alison Jacques, London.
Slovakian sculptor Mária Bartuszová’s biomorphic creations were inspired by weather, the human body, and the harmony that she found in her surroundings. She employed unique methods of casting plaster by hand - including pouring wet plaster into balloons and moulding them into abstract forms by pushing, pressing, and pulling inside the rubber. In Untitled she created unique textures by incorporating string into wet plaster. This inventive approach to form and material resulted in a composition that is fragile and suggests a sense of erosion of surfaces over time, thus celebrating the impressionable qualities of the medium. The inclusion of multiple examples of her work in PLASTER! is timely and appropriate as it has been retroactively receiving praise and attention that its merit commands. Her inclusion at Documenta in 2007 and her forthcoming exhibition at TATE Modern highlight her international importance by recognising her contribution to expanding the limitations of sculptural technique through her unique approach to working with plaster.
Rachel Whiteread, SIT, 2007-8. Plaster, pigment and steel (seven units and one chair). 75.6 × 48.3 × 49.5 cm. Source: the artist and Gagosian. Photo by Mike Bruce.
Casting the spaces that surround objects, Rachel Whiteread’s SIT reexplores an idea that American multimedia artist Bruce Nauman discarded at the beginning of the sixties – creating a sculptural object from the space that lay under a chair leading to the discovery that an experience can be made solid. The spaces inside the buildings we inhabit and domestic objects that are part of our everyday world can bear incidental traces of our lives. By looking for these hints Whiteread presents the interior as an account by which contemporaries can better understand the past and the way people lived their lives through communicating what culture was like, what kind of transactions occurred within it, and what kind of people constituted it. Through SIT, she comments on the opposition between positive and negative space and renders the chair’s intended function invalid by filling the seat with blocks of plaster. This antithesis is a common theme in her works throughout her career and reflects her own artistic relationship with plaster, which her sculptural practice has since become synonymous with.
Installation view of PLASTER!. Source: Stuart Lochhead Sculpture.
Overall, PLASTER! packs a punch and provides an insightful examination of the different artistic uses of the medium throughout art history. The incorporation of plaster display walls and inventive pairings illustrates its versatile nature and prompts viewers to question its secondary status on the market. By effectively tracing its impressive evolution through the ages by bringing together a diverse selection of works, PLASTER! constructs a compelling account of the technical capacity of the medium and makes us think twice.
PLASTER! can now be viewed on Stuart Lochhead’s website.
Carlisle Berkley
Contributing Writer, MADE IN BED