Everything I do, I intend to make on a large scale. . . . Size itself has its own impact, and physically we can relate ourselves more strongly to a big sculpture than to a small one.
—Henry Moore
Gagosian, in collaboration with the Henry Moore Foundation, is pleased to present a major exhibition of large-scale sculptures by Henry Moore, some of which are being presented indoors for the first time.
Moore’s oeuvre, emblematic of modern British sculpture, is informed by elements of the abstract, the surreal, the primitive, and the classical. His rolling corporeal forms are as accessible and familiar as they are distinctly avant-garde. Moore’s first solo sculpture exhibition was held in London in 1928; by the late 1940s he had become one of Britain’s most celebrated artists with a diverse body of work that encompassed drawings, graphics, textiles, and sculpture. In the following decades he continued to receive increasingly significant sculpture commissions, following a major retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1946 and winning the international prize at the Venice Biennale in 1948. His heightened success and fame provided him with the means to work increasingly in bronze rather than by direct carving, thus achieving the monumental scale that he had always desired for his work. His large-scale sculptures have been placed in indoor and outdoor environments all over the world, including Kenwood House, London; Dallas City Hall Plaza; Tiergarten, Berlin; the University of Chicago; Exchange Square, Hong Kong; UNESCO headquarters, Paris; Lincoln Center, New York; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; the United Nations Headquarters, New York; the Houses of Parliament, London; St. Paul’s Cathedral, London; and the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, Japan.
