This major exhibition of British sculpture is the result of a collaboration between the Taipei Fine Arts Museum and the British Council. Comprising 61 works by 23 artists, the exhibition covers the 40 year period 1961-2001 and provides the first opportunity for audiences in Taiwan to see something of the spirit and invention that has characterised British art during this exceptional period. Of all the artforms in Britain, sculpture has commonly been regarded as the most surprising and innovative during the 20th Century.

Beginning with the coloured sculptures of Anthony Caro (Sculpture Seven, 1961 and Month of May, 1963) and Phillip King (Rosebud, 1962 and Ripple, 1963), the exhibition opens on a radical note with works which rid sculpture of any association with objects and images from the outside world and which broke free of all that had gone before in British sculpture. The ability to adapt and incorporate new materials and technologies has been one of the motivating forces behind British sculpture, and the exhibition includes many key works by successive generations of artists which have helped to re-define the language of sculpture: Barry Flanagan’s soft organic sculptures (Heap 4, 1967), early video ‘sculpture’ by Gilbert and George (Portrait of the Artists as Young Men; Gordonís Makes us Drunk and In the Bush, all from 1972), Richard Long re-inventing the landscape by walking across it (England, 1968); Tony Cragg (Canoe, 1982) and Bill Woodrow (Crow and Carrion, 1981) re-cycling and giving new life to everyday objects, Mona Hatoum filming the inside of her own body (Corps Ètranger, 1994). The exhibition comes up to the present with a new installation by Richard Wilson (Room 921, Empress Hotel, 2001) specially commissioned for this occasion by the Taipei Fine Arts Museum.

A bilingual catalogue (Mandarin Chinese and English) was published by the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, with texts by Lewis Biggs, until recently Director of Tate Liverpool, now Director of the Liverpool Biennial, and Fang-Wei Chang, Curator of the Taipei Fine Arts Museum.

Artists included in the exhibition:

Anthony Caro, Mat Collishaw, Tony Cragg, Michael Craig-Martin, Richard Deacon, Barry Flanagan, Anya Gallaccio, Gilbert and George, Douglas Gordon, Antony Gormley, Siobhán Hapaska, Mona Hatoum, Damien Hirst, Anish Kapoor, Phillip King, Michael Landy, Richard Long, Sarah Lucas, Eduardo Paolozzi, Richard Wentworth, Rachel Whiteread, Richard Wilson, Bill Woodrow

Exhibition tour dates:

Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taiwan7 April - 24 June 2001

For further information please contact Richard Riley<mailto:richard.riley@britishcouncil.org>