IVOR ABRAHAMS
Ivor Abrahams (born 1935), who was elected to the Royal Academy in 1989, is a leading figure in modern British art and first gained international reputation for his sculpture on the theme of gardens. He has constantly returned to this subject throughout his career, examining the confrontation between nature and artifice, the functional and the decorative. The artist cuts, paints and manipulates photographic images to create highly individual, colourfully decorated and humorous three-dimensional collages. Further works evolve from these assemblages in bronze, clay or resin that are painted or patinated with great subtlety.
Abrahams’s extensive repertoire is also dominated by the imagery of domestic interiors, cityscapes and seascapes, figures, animals, and classical mythology. Motivated by a desire to make art that is widely accessible, he teams the abstract with the familiar. Abrahams owes his interest to both the rural and urban environment to the influence of prolonged periods of his life spent in southern France and in London, where he currently lives and works.
From 1979 onwards Abrahams gave visible priority to the figure and its relation to the ground and its surroundings. In particular, he embraced the female nude, one of the greatest themes in western poetic invention and the most demeaned in contemporary life. Working directly with dancers and gymnasts he depicted the female bathing, in motion or in classical settings through a whole spectrum of imagery that evokes the pain of desire as well as a gratitude for life and physical wholeness. Abrahams characteristically combines a degree of mockery towards mass imagery with a deep romanticism relating to the mystery and beauty of the female form.