These artworks were chosen from our own private collection, from within the gallery’s inventory and from our supportive collectors.
For the first time, a selection of these major works are being shown together with a summary of each museum exhibition they graced. Whilst the sculptures contrast in subject, artist and date, they all have been carefully selected by independent curators outside of the gallery to engage and inspire their viewers.
The pieces featured in the exhibition span two centuries including works by Antoine-Louis Barye, Joseph Bernard, Rembrandt Bugatti, Albéric Collin, Geoffrey Dashwood, Edgar Degas, Emile Antoine Bourdelle, Aristide Maillol and Auguste Rodin amongst others. Highlights include Degas’s ‘Cheval faisant une descente de main, 1865-1881’, a rare, equine study which depicts a horse with its head lowered, possibly representing a spirited horse freed from its stall to pasture. This important work was loaned to the Yun Contemporary Art Centre in Shanghai, China. Also included are Rembrandt Bugatti’s delicate depiction of ‘Two Antelopes 1911’ a bronze loaned to the Mullin Automotive Museum, California for an important retrospective of the Bugatti family; Jules Dalou’s ‘Workers’, a series of sketches depicting labourers and agricultural workers which he produced for a proposed Monument to the Workers, loaned to the Lightbox, Surrey; and Auguste Rodin’s famous set of the ‘Burghers of Calais’ which are currently part of a major exhibition focusing on Impressionism in Sculpture at the Staedel Museum, in Frankfurt.
Also on show is a group of works by the Italian sculptor Rembrandt Bugatti which were shown at a seminal retrospective exhibition at the Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin in 2014.
The exhibition will run from 23 June 2020.
