Woking, The Lightbox, 2D:3D – Discover the Art of Sculpture: Sculpture & Sculptors’ Drawings from The Ingram Collection, 1 February – 1 March 2008;
Woking, The Lightbox, Bodies! The Ingram Collection, 21 November 2015 – 31 January 2016;
London, Royal College of General Practitioners, Health and the Body, 3 March – 29 May 2016;
Bristol, RWA, Frink-Blow-Lawson, 16 December 2017 – 11 March 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
Literature:
Bryan Robertson (intro.), Elisabeth Frink Sculpture Catalogue Raisonne, Harpvale, Salisbury, 1984, no. 67, illustrated (another cast), and illustrated in colour p.116 (another cast);
A. Ratuszniak (ed.) Elisabeth Frink Catalogue Raisonne of Sculpture 1947-1993, London, 2013, p. 72, no. FCR 80, another cast illustrated
Dame Elisabeth Frink’s childhood experiences of the Second World War is central to her work. With air stations surrounding her childhood home in Suffolk, Frink frequently witnessed returning aeroplanes crashing and catching on fire. Spinning Man II portrays a man disorientated in mid-air. The weightlessness of floating astronauts, with Russian Yuri Gagarin becoming the first man in space in 1961, also inspired Frink in her spatial experiments with the human figure. Here, the head is contained within a helmet, as with many of Frink’s other spinning and falling sculptures of men. As Frink once said, they seem to ‘drift or plummet through space quite out of control’. These earlier sculptures are a combination of men at war, ‘they were too much involved with fractured wings or the debris of war and heroics’ to be at all sensual as with some of her later works.
