Summer exhibition: Larger Than Life

Installation photographs by Jamie Randall, Stephanie Rennie and Jo Sullivan.

Drawing inspiration from Messums West’s Festival of Dance, and activating the lawns and landscape surrounding the barn, curator Isabel de Vasconcellos has conceived Larger Than Life. 

From Laurence Edwards’ peripatetic Walking Men, to Sophie Ryder’s Dancing Ladies and Helaine Blumenfeld’s pivotal Souls, created in 1985 following her breakthrough exhibition with Henry Moore, the show renders the body as engine of movement in metal and stone.
 
In dialogue with the programme of contemporary choreography, workshops and films inside the barn, it probes the complementary dichotomies of inner and outer, fluid and solid; contingency and constancy, fleeting and timelessness.
 
Featured alongside works by Sean Henry, Thomas Merrett and Jason Mulligan, these sculptures present movement and stillness as the outward expression inner states of being.
 
The exhibition is accompanied by a new essay.