Lot 79: Growing

Hubert Dalwood (1924-1976)
Growing
aluminium
14 x 19½ in. (35.6 x 49.5 cm.), excluding board
Conceived in 1957 in an edition of six.

C. Stephens, The Sculpture of Hubert Dalwood, Aldershot, 1999, p. 40, no. 90 (another cast illustrated).

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''It is telling that the bulk of Dalwood's sculptures from 1957 are reliefs. One may see in this both an indication of the painterly source for his new work and his negotiation of a sculpture that was not figurative but remained, to an extent, representational. The human figure had always been the major, almost exclusive, subject of sculpture and one might see Dalwood trying to find new motifs. He had shown an early interest in such an endeavour when teaching at Newport, where he asked students to make a sculpture of a bunch of flowers. Though principally associated with classical and Renaissance art, the relief had enjoyed a revival in the 1950s through the work of Henry Moore and Bernard Meadows in Britain and, for example, of Giacomo Manzú in Italy.
Lynton describes some of the reliefs as still-lifes but one might see them as less specific than that. Comparisons can be made with (William) Scott's stylisation of pots and pans, but the right hand forms (in the present work) also resemble trees in ancient Egyptian wall paintings. Dalwood's titles reveal his concern with a more generalised nature, with symbols of growth, nourishment and fecundity'' (see C. Stephens, The Sculpture of Hubert Dalwood, Aldershot, 1999, p. 40).