Helen Chadwick was a conceptual artist who worked in sculpture, photography, and installation. Her provocative artworks examined representations of gender and the body in what proved to be a pioneering and influential practice in contemporary British art.
Read MoreChadwick was born in Croydon in South London, where she attended school and later enrolled in a fine art foundation course at Croydon College. She studied sculpture at Brighton Polytechnic from 1973 to 1976, and graduated with an MA from London's Chelsea School of Art in 1977.
Chadwick rose to prominence following her solo exhibition Of Mutability (1986), first exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. She was one of the first women to be nominated for the Turner Prize in 1987. In 1994, she was one of three British artists to show at the São Paulo Biennial.
Chadwick taught at many of London's major art schools, including the Royal College of Art, Chelsea School of Art, Goldsmiths, and Central Saint Martins, where she was a significant influence on the new generation of Young British Artists.
Chadwick died suddenly from heart failure at 42. She has been the subject of numerous retrospectives that recognise her influence on contemporary British art.
Though Chadwick is known primarily for her sculpture and photography, her experimentation with performance and various forms of technology, including video, slide and light projectors, computers, microscopes, and photocopiers, reflected her innovative integration of new media in contemporary art practice.
From early on in her practice, Chadwick explored the body, gender, and identity, often basing her works on her own body, whether as subject or object. Subverting traditional representations of gender and the body, Chadwick navigated the boundaries between desire and repulsion, sensual and abject, organic and inorganic through a visceral, tactile sensibility. Her uninhibited, direct approach to art making saw her incorporate materials such as chocolate, rotting food, flowers, fur, flesh, and bodily fluids.
Piss Flowers (1991—1992) featured 12 lacquered-white bronze casts of snow that Chadwick and her partner had urinated on—the cavities forming phallic protrusions on flower shaped platforms. Cacao (1994), a large, bubbling chocolate fountain, spoke to desire, pleasure, and excess, while simultaneously exuding a nauseating vulgarity. Giving form to transgressive behaviours and taboo ideas, Chadwick proposes a new aesthetic of bodily existence and pleasure.
One of Chadwick's seminal works, The Oval Court (1986) was a multi-part installation comprised of collage and sculpture. The collage features 12 life-sized cyan photocopies of the artist's naked body amongst animals and plants, installed horizontally on a raised flat blue surface as though floating in a two-dimensional pool. Centred on the platform are five golden spheres; the facing wall presents another large-scale photo collage of Chadwick's photocopied weeping face atop five Corinthian columns.
The Oval Court reflects the artist's interest in the intersections of science and Biblical mythology, with earthly globes, the nude entwined with nature, and the figure 12 suggestive of the 12 gates to heaven. Historically underappreciated, this work is the subject of a book by Marina Warner, Helen Chadwick: The Oval Court (2022).
Chadwick is known for her photographic series Wreaths to Pleasure (1992—1993). Comprised of 13 round Cibachrome prints encased in colourful powder-coated steel frames, each 'wreath' fuses flowers with various viscous compounds in carefully arranged compositions. Bluebells, orchids, tulips, and dandelions float on the surface of hair gel, milk, tomato juice, antiseptic creams, window cleaner, and engine oil.
The circular format of each Wreath to Pleasure, combined with a close-up aerial view of the photographs, evokes a sense of looking down into a Petri dish, and generates pseudo-scientific associations. Inviting messy, manufactured substances of the modern world to join conventional objects of beauty, Chadwick presents sensual images that dissolve the polarities of the pure and toxic, clean and dirty, pleasure and discomfort.
Selected solo exhibitions include Bad Blooms, Richard Saltoun Gallery, London (2014); Piss Flowers, Frieze Sculpture Park, London (2013); Wreaths to Pleasure, Henry Moore Institute, Leeds (2012); Helen Chadwick: A Retrospective, Barbican Art Gallery, London, travelled to Manchester Art Gallery; Trapholt Museum of Modern Art and Design, Kolding; and Liljevalchs, Stockholm (2004—2005); Bad Blooms, Museum of Modern Art, New York (1995); Effluvia, Serpentine Gallery, London (1994); Poesies, Salzburger Kunstverein, Salzburg (1994); Flesh & Flower, Zelda Cheatle Gallery, London (1994); Meat Lamps, The British School at Rome (1992); Fruit Rage, Plaza de los Carros, Madrid (1992); De light, Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (1991); Viral Landscapes, 121 Art Gallery, Antwerp (1990); Allegory of Misrule, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery (1987); and Of Mutability, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London (1986).
Helen Chadwick's works are held in collections including the Tate Britain; Victoria and Albert Museum; National Portrait Gallery, London; National Galleries of Scotland; Arts Council, London; British Council; Henry Moore Institute, Leeds; LUX Collection, London; Nottingham City Museums & Galleries; Sheffield Galleries & Museums Trust; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Misong Kim | Ocula | 2021
