Pangolin London presents Reconfiguring the Figure, a group exhibition that takes Lynn Chadwick as a point of departure to examine how figurative sculpture has evolved from the post-war period to the present. Bringing Modern British masters into dialogue with contemporary artists, the exhibition considers how the figure has been challenged, fragmented, and rebuilt across shifts in materials, methods, and context. Rather than proposing a single thesis, the presentation maps approaches to the body—direct portrayal, symbolic substitution, reflective surface, and data-based imaging—while tracing lines of continuity between generations.
Chadwick’s work frames the exhibition’s historical axis. Replacing soft modelling with constructed, angular forms, he developed men and women—often solitary or paired, cloaked, winged, walking, seated, or reclining—whose recognizable silhouettes maintain an intentional emotional distance. Polished bronze faces reflect the viewer’s gaze back outward, turning the act of looking into part of the work’s subject. As Chadwick observed, “No expression is an expression,” a remark that clarifies how the figure in his sculpture operates less as a register of emotion and more as an instrument for perception.
At the center of the presentation is Stairs, the largest work from Chadwick’s series of the same name. Two female figures pass one another on a simple set of steps—an encounter that could be read as greeting or indifference—poised between motion and pause. The piece reflects Chadwick’s method of welding linear skeletons and building them into solid form, a process that blends architectural clarity with a sense of latent movement and helped shape a key chapter of post-war British sculpture.
The exhibition situates this language alongside mid-century artists who pressed the figure in divergent directions—sensual, symbolic, skeletal, and mechanical—and, in doing so, challenged classical expectations. Geoffrey Clarke’s Horse and Rider combines forged iron with driftwood found on a Normandy beach. The hybrid construction underscores the experimental energy of the period, when welding and assemblage opened new routes for figuration beyond casting and carving traditions.
Other works from the era translate lived experience and historical aftermath into sculptural terms. George Fullard’s The Infant St George carries the imprint of conflict in its roughly hewn wood and metal surfaces, while Elisabeth Frink’s Soldier’s Head II compresses volume into a scarred, defiant head that reads as both emblem and witness. Even as British sculpture moved decisively toward pure abstraction, artists such as Frink and Fullard continued to advance the human form as a site of innovation. Figuration endured through that radical shift and has remained elastic—capable of absorbing each generation’s anxieties, ideals, and materials.
From this mid-century ground, Reconfiguring the Figure extends into the twenty-first century to examine how contemporary practice broadens the very meaning of “figure.” Here, figuration is no longer confined to the depiction of a body. Instead, it encompasses strategies for expressing human presence and emotion through reflection, scientific imaging, and animal proxies, as well as through the interplay of analog and digital processes.
Zachary Eastwood-Bloom’s Human Error introduces mirrored glass busts derived from AI-generated data. Familiar yet deliberately uncanny, the works reflect viewers back to themselves, echoing the reflective faces in Chadwick’s sculpture while placing the encounter within debates about identity in a digital context. The piece functions as an interface as much as a portrait, where personhood is mediated by algorithmic procedures and the mechanics of looking.
Angela Palmer’s The Last Frontier moves beyond surface likeness to the architecture of cognition. Working with Harvard Medical School, Palmer used a thousand micro-scans of the brain to engrave a three-dimensional image across twenty-eight layers of glass. When viewed together, the panes cohere into a luminous, suspended volume that draws scientific imaging into sculptural practice. The result extends the figure into cerebral territory, presenting a portrait assembled from increments and transparencies rather than a single continuous form.
Laura Ford approaches figuration through animal embodiment. Days of Judgement – Cat 2, inspired by Masaccio’s The Expulsion from the Garden of Eden, stages a tall, cat-like figure that paces with anxious energy. Stripped of facial expression yet charged with apprehension, the work becomes a proxy for guilt and self-reflection. With this surrogate body, Ford tests how vulnerability and resilience can register without resorting to direct human depiction.
Together, these contemporary works expand the language of figuration while maintaining a link to Chadwick’s legacy of experimentation. Across carving, casting, welding, assemblage, reflective surfaces, and medical imaging, the figure remains a flexible vehicle for asking what constitutes human presence in sculpture. The body—literal or implied—continues to be sculpture’s most adaptable means of exploring human experience.
The roster underscores the breadth of this inquiry. Mid-century artists represented include Kenneth Armitage, Michael Ayrton, John Bridgeman, Ralph Brown, Reg Butler, Lynn Chadwick, Geoffrey Clarke, Elisabeth Frink, George Fullard, John Hoskin, Bryan Kneale, F. E. McWilliam, Eduardo Paolozzi, and Rosemary Young. Contemporary artists on view include Anthony Abrahams, Victoria Atkinson, David Bailey, Glenys Barton, Jon Buck, Terence Coventry, Zachary Eastwood-Bloom, Abigail Fallis, Laura Ford, Sue Freeborough, Thomas Merrett, Breon O’Casey, Angela Palmer, William Tucker, and Anastassia Zamaraeva.
Documentation accompanies the presentation. A catalogue is available on request, and the gallery provides image references that include Chadwick’s Stairs (bronze), Clarke’s Horse and Rider (iron and driftwood), Frink’s Soldier’s Head II (bronze), Palmer’s The Last Frontier (engraved across twenty-eight glass plates), and Eastwood-Bloom’s Father Sky / Uranus (bronze). These materials supply context for the exhibition’s emphasis on method—how each artist’s choice of medium and process shapes what a “figure” can be.
In assembling works that range from welded armatures to layered glass and mirrored AI-derived forms, Pangolin London locates figuration as a continuing site of inquiry rather than a fixed category. The selection shows how sculptors use the figure to negotiate proximity and distance, surface and depth, anatomy and analogy. Across the installation, viewers encounter bodies presented outright, implied by reflective planes, or reconstructed through scientific data. In each case, the figure carries the weight of representation and, at the same time, tests the limits of what representation must include to register as human.
Venue and dates: Pangolin London, Kings Place, 90 York Way, London N1 9AG — Reconfiguring the Figure runs from 19 November 2025 to 24 January 2026.
