'Body & Void' Tour Day, From My City

London-based bespoke events company From My City is organising a special day trip to the Henry Moore Foundation in Perry Green. Including coffee on arrival and lunch at the Hoops Inn , the day will centre around a private tour of what Culture Whisper believes is an incredibly thought provoking show: Body & Void: Echoes of Moore in Contemporary Art. A show that reinstates the resounding influence of one of Britain's greatest sculptors. 

When Henry Moore was born in 1898 Rodin was avant-garde and most sculpture looked like Bernini’s, i.e. classical and naturalistic. When Moore died in 1986 ,however, sculpture itself might have seemed old-fashioned: exclusive, hierarchical, eternal – not fashionably site-specific, critical, or transient, in line with the new language of contemporary art. But Moore’s generation questioned what art could be, opening the way for his successors to demolish it.

In the transition from the ‘modern’ to the cutting-edge ‘contemporary’, some 20th century masters faired better than others. Duchamp did well: once a weird sideshow, he suddenly became the godfather of post-war art. George Braque, on the other hand, did not: once the greatest Cubist, he fell out of fashion with his questions of light, space, form and colour. No artist with press coverage bothers about those things in the ‘post-Aesthetic’ age.

For some, Henry Moore followed the same posthumous trajectory as Braque. In his day Moore, pioneered direct carving (where the sculptor doesn’t make a model but just ploughs into the rock with the chisel) and investigations of inner and outer space, internal and external forms, and figures in landscapes/that look like landscapes. This is real Modernist stuff and, according to the accepted narrative, it has been 'outdated' since the 1960s.

But Aesthetics are not outdated, neither is Moore, and Body & Void is going to show us why, and how. The Henry Moore Foundation have commissioned works from contemporary artists Richard Deacon and Richard Long, as well as showing pieces by people like Damien Hirst, Antony Gormley, Joseph Beuys, Keith Coventry, Tony Cragg, Anish Kapoor, Bruce Nauman, and Rachel Whiteread. The intention is to show that there is no schism between the Modernists and the fast-and-loose post-War lot.

Thinking about this list of contemporary superstars, they all take something from Moore. Whether it is the use of organic forms, a sense of synthesis with landscape, or the idea of a figure in the real world, they certainly could not have made a leap into their own practice straight from Rodin. Moore was interested in sculpture: how it looked, what it meant as sculpture. These remain central concerns of contemporary sculptors today. We have been conditioned by the mantra that  ‘it isn’t what it looks like, it is what it says that matters'. But this exhibition will enlighten us with another:  ‘contemporary sculpture looks like it does because of Henry Moore’.