The Vagaries and Misconceptions of the Modern Man

The exhibition ‘The Vagaries and Misconceptions of the Modern Man’ brought together recent sculptural works by Ralph Darbyshire, Richard Hollinshead and Kenneth Ross, and was curated around the fallibilities in seemingly certain masculine positions. Figurative in the broadest sense, these sculptural works collectively engaged with difficult material including political unrest, sexuality, violence or male body image. Research by Hollinshead included in the exhibition was the etching Dependable Bodies and the sculpture Sanit Forma. These two works referenced the visual language of classical Greek sculpture, and the idealised male form it promotes, to explore contemporary male identity. Within the curatorial construct for the exhibition they operated to establish contemporary figurative sculpture within a continuum, and as an aesthetic counterpoint to the ‘visually-loaded’ work of Darbyshire and Ross – violence, in Hollinshead’s work, is directed internally as a destructive force; childhood dreams and ambitions are not realised.

The specific positioning of the sculpture Sanit Forma within the Vane Gallery space, and the manner in which the audience experienced the work, was discussed as part of the conference paper Fit for Purpose: The Classical Millstone, the Classical Touchstone presented at the Art, Classicism and Discourse from 1755 to Today conference at the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, UK in 2019.

https://www.vane.org.uk/exhibitions/the-vagaries-and-misconceptions-of-the-modern-man