Phyllida Barlow - Hauser & Wirth/Tate Modern review: Quietly life-affirming works

Barlow’s essentially abstract works always prompt hints of recognition - and two new shows grapple with big questions
Phyllida Barlow’s work at Hauser & Wirth
Alex Delfanne
Ben Luke1 September 2021

Phyllida Barlow’s sculptures make physical demands on us. They stretch up to the heights of galleries and into their corners, they impede us, consume our field of vision, confuse us.

The centrepiece of her exhibition at Hauser & Wirth, untitled: postscorral (2014), is in a huge gallery, but the posts of the title – shafts of painted wood with lumpy scrim and cement feet, propped up by poppy-red wedges – are arranged in a wonky, tightly packed circle, so they keep us out of the empty centre of the space and force us into its perimeter. We’re always close to the posts; we can’t but experience their raw sculptural power.

The Hauser & Wirth show begins an avalanche of exhibition openings after the art world’s customary summer break, ahead of the Frieze art fair in October. It coincides with the opening of an in-depth, free display of Barlow’s work across three galleries at Tate Modern – the latest in the Artist Rooms series.

Phyllida Barlow, Artist Room at Tate Modern
©Tate (Jai Monaghan) 2021

The Tate show is mainly drawn from the last decade, in which Barlow has risen from being a respected artist’s artist and teacher to being widely regarded as among the most important sculptors working today. But it also includes a few earlier works – a rarity, since so much of her sculpture from previous decades no longer exists.

Object for the television (1994) features a plaster form atop an old TV, which becomes a plinth. What is this absurd, floppy white oblong with two bulbous but pointy protrusions? The point is that it’s uncertain. It’s odd, it doesn’t illustrate anything or spell anything out like the images on a television might. And that strangeness seems to compel Barlow to keep asking questions of her sculpture, a quarter of a century on.

You see it in her drawings, too, at both Tate and Hauser. It’s always enlightening to see them with her sculptures. The relationship between the two isn’t a neat, sketch-to-masterpiece progression. But they’re in dialogue, as Barlow thinks through forms and space. An untitled drawing at Tate Modern is a flurry of red and black loops over an orange glow, adding up to a bulging form which clearly relates to a sculpture high up on a nearby wall, untitled: torque (2015), a loose coil of cement, foam and paint. A huge hollow cylinder bound to what looks like a grand piano in two of the drawings appears in sculptural form hanging from Tate’s ceiling, with an interior that looks like a craggy coalface.

Barlow’s art is essentially abstract but it always prompts hints of recognition. It evokes things we encounter in daily life like balls of string, street furniture, display racks in shops, flytipped items at the roadside. Occasionally, it resembles people – those posts at Hauser conjure a huddle of protestors.

Barlow is grappling not just with what it means to make sculpture but also with the messy, awkward, curious experience of being a human body navigating through the world. And it’s quietly life-affirming.

Hauser & Wirth until Sep 18, Tate Modern until 2023 (hauserwirth.com, tate.org.uk)

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