Henry Moore Foundation announce 2023 programme

Michael E. Smith

24 March – 18 June 2023

Henry Moore Institute
Main Galleries
Free entry to all

Michael E. Smith’s sculptures respond to a culture of aggressive consumption and the rapid exhaustion of reserves. Working with found materials, both manufactured and natural, stripped to their bare minimum and reconfigured through juxtaposition or placement, Smith makes constructions that are laden with a sense of foreboding. The treasured and the thrown away collide, occasionally with a wry humour, to speak of fragility, loss and shared states, be they political, economic or personal. Smith’s sculptures exist as accumulated traces of human experience, of want, need and excesses. The installation of his exhibitions is always critical, with existing architecture and light harnessed as something of a pedestal. Responding to the galleries of the Henry Moore Institute, the exhibition – Smith’s first solo presentation in a UK institution – will include new and recent work.

Michael E. Smith lives and works in Providence, Rhode Island. His work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at institutions that include: Kunsthalle Basel, 2018; SMAK, Ghent, 2017; Kunstverein Hannover, 2015; De Appel, Amsterdam, 2015; Sculpture Center, Queens, 2015; La Triennale di Milano, Milan, 2014; Power Station, Dallas, 2014; CAPC musee d’art contemporain de Bordeaux, Bordeaux, 2013; and Contemporary Art Museum, St Louis, 2011, among others. Smith was included in the 58th Venice Biennale and participated in the 2022 and 2012 Whitney Biennial. His work has additionally been included in group exhibitions at venues including MoMA PS1, Queens, 2014; Frankfurter Kunstverein, 2014; and MOCA Cleveland, Cleveland, 2013, among others.

Vitality: The Human Landscapes of Henry Moore

5 April – 29 October 2023

Henry Moore Studios & Gardens

Henry Moore’s close friend, the writer Herbert Read, once said of him ‘a classical ideal of beauty is not the aim of the artist but this alternative ideal of vitality, of integrated form and feeling.’ For Moore, nature and the human body were sources of vitality, expressions of life-force, which he could harness in his work, incorporating their forms in his art, uniting and concentrating their vital energy.

Moore’s forms often appear abstract but he was fundamentally a figurative artist – the human body remained his core concern throughout his life. He understood that we learn to navigate the world around us ‘through our own bodies. From our mother’s breast, from our bones, from bumping into things, we learn what is rough and what is smooth.’ Exploring such juxtapositions of hard and soft, large and small, round and sharp, organic and mechanical, became part of Moore’s sculptural process. In his maquette studio he surrounded himself with natural forms, bones, stones, shells and drift wood which he would turn over, mount, build up and cut down through the addition of plaster.

Moore transformed flints and bones into figures. He allowed the natural form to dictate the shape of the body. When he enlarged these works and placed them outside, the figure also corresponded with the landscape. The rise and fall of the body – knees, breasts, and shoulders – echoed the forms of the land – mountains, valleys, caves and rocky outcrops. Moore enhanced the relationship of his works to their environment by incorporating space within them. He broke the figure into multiple parts and pierced his sculptures to incorporate holes, opposing volume and void and making space a part of the sculpture. This created a greater sense of three-dimensionality and brought the landscape into the very form of the work.

In 2023, a selection of twenty-one of Moore’s bronzes are displayed in the landscape adjacent to the studios where he developed ideas. Natural and human forms can be seen to have inspired sculptures across all of Moore’s most iconic themes: the mother and child, the reclining figure, and the juxtaposition of internal/external forms. A number of Moore’s multi-part reclining figures, where he asks the viewer to imaginatively piece together the body, are joined by some of his purest organic abstractions in which we can trace the journey from handheld pebble to monumental work. Explore Moore’s sculptures as they soar above us and around us like the landscape in which they sit.

The Weight of Words

7 July – 26 November 2023

Henry Moore Institute
Main Galleries
Free entry to all

The Weight of Words is an international group exhibition about the pursuit of poetry by sculptural means. It features an intergenerational array of contemporary artists and poets from around the world who explore profound connections between the plastic and linguistic qualities of words, in ways that range from the humorous to the haunting.

Some of the works exhibit language as form. Others imply or encourage practices of speaking, writing and reading in poetic ways. Each work uses the weight, scale and context of their material presence to expand the imaginative potential of what is shaped, expressed and left behind in the name of poetry.

The exhibition is co-curated with Nick Thurston, Reader in Fine Art, University of Leeds.

Artists include:

Caroline Bergvall
Pavel Büchler
Vahni Capildeo
Tim Etchells

Simone Fattal
Shilpa Gupta
Emma Hart
Leslie Hewitt

Bhanu Kapil
Issam Kourbaj
Glenn Ligon
Shanzai Lyric

Mark Manders
Joo Yeon Park
Doris Salcedo
Slavs and Tatars