Woking, The Lightbox, The Ingram Collection: The Impact of War, 15 October 2014 – 4 January 2015;
London, The Sammy Ofer Centre, London Business School, London | Forward Facing, 26 September 2017 – 30 September 2018;
Kendal, Abbot Hall Art Gallery, Elisabeth Frink: Fragility and Power, 22 June – 29 September 2018;
Woking, The Lightbox, Elisabeth Frink: A Collector’s Passion, 13 October 2018 – 6 January 2019;
London, Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, Sculpting in Sound: Researching Sculpting Lives, 4 October – 15 December 2021
Dame Elisabeth Frink was moved very strongly by the Algerian War (1954-62) and the Moroccan henchmen of this conflict. Her series of Goggle Heads were inspired by a photograph of General Mohammad Oufkir. The sense of hidden menace looked to Frink “extraordinarily sinister”. As with her 1969 sculpture sharing the same title, Goggle Head employs the motif of eyes concealed behind dark glasses and a heavy jowled profile as a metaphor of thuggish aggression. These works had an overtly political impetus for Frink, “these goggle heads became for me a symbol of evil and destruction in North Africa and, in the end, everywhere else.”
