Little Girl III, 1987
Bronze
From the edition of 9 casts

Literature
Dennis Farr & Eva Chadwick, Lynn Chadwick: Sculptor, (London : Lund Humphries, 2006) C66 ill. p382
175.0 x 120.0 x 124.0 cm (69 x 47¼ x 48¾ inches)

Literature:
Dennis Farr & Eva Chadwick, Lynn Chadwick: Sculptor, (London : Lund Humphries, 2006) C66 ill. p382

Notes:
Lynn Chadwick was born in London in 1914. He trained as a draughtsman and in 1937 joined an architectural practice, designing exhibition stands for trade fairs. During the war, Chadwick served as a pilot in the Fleet Air Arm. Afterwards he moved to Stroud, Gloucestershire and began constructing mobiles out of wire and balsa wood. He had his first one-man show in 1950 and in 1952 contributed sculptures to the British entry at the XXVI Venice Biennale. This was the exhibition that prompted the art critic Herbert Read to coin the phrase ‘the geometry of fear’ to describe the work of Chadwick and his fellow British contributors. In the early 1950s, Chadwick began to concentrate on solid, free-standing sculptures. In 1952, he entered a competition to design a Monument to the Unknown Political Prisoner and received a prize and an honourable mention.

In 1956, Chadwick won the prestigious International Sculpture Prize at the XXVIII Venice Biennale, which secured his international reputation. In 1962, with the American sculptors David Smith and Alexander Calder he contributed to an open air sculpture project for the Festival of Two Worlds in Spoleto, Italy. Chadwick was appointed a CBE in 1964. He continued to exhibit widely until his death in 2003. Tate Britain held a major Chadwick exhibition later in that year. Little Girl III is characteristic of Chadwick’s mature style, using a pyramid form for the female head and displaying his signature technique of welded steel struts, which he uses here to evoke pleated fabric. The present work is one of three variations on this subject, ironically entitled ‘Little Girl’ although each figure is over life size.
POA