studiosavant: Peter Hide @ The RAM

The North Edmonton Sculpture Workshop is pleased to present an exhibition of five large-scale sculptures by Peter Hide at the Royal Alberta Museum.

British-born sculptor Peter Hide has distinguished himself as one of the world's foremost practitioners of welded-steel sculpture. Working in the assembled sculpture tradition of Pablo Picasso, David Smith and Anthony Caro, Hide has produced artworks of remarkable individuality and innovation. He is represented in important private and public collections throughout North America and Europe and currently makes his home in Edmonton, Canada where he teaches at the University of Alberta.

Below is a brief introduction to each of the sculptures exhibited here, as written by the artist himself.

"After Michaelangelo was made after a visit to Florence in 1993, where I was overwhelmed by the reclining figures of Michaelangelo’s Medici Tomb; here again though the image of the sculpture refuses simply to become a reclining figure. This is how abstraction is achieved; by using one image to cancel another.

Dark Indeterminacy suggests to me, at any rate, a primeval monster rearing itself out of a swamp perhaps, but walk around to the side view and it becomes a sequence of collapsing planes. Again the aim is to surprise, to defeat the expectations of the viewer, but within the terms of a formal logic. Sculpture is the most literal of the arts and consequently has to struggle hardest to overcome its matter of factness to move the imagination.

Equus, as the title suggests, can be seen as the image of a life size horse; there is even a suggestion of a harness in the massive form of the clevis that forms the centrepiece of the work.

In King of Clubs, massive, simple forms are dispersed to create a complex outline suggestive of an enthroned figure. The central form of the figure can be seen as the folds of a robe or perhaps the fluted surface of a Greek column.

Malevich Extended is composed of a sequence of fragments rescued from unresolved sculptures. This use of fragments or passages is not new in my work, but to make an entire sculpture from them is. These passages were arranged from right to left on a 24 foot long base.... Having more or less completed the piece I can now see that it was probably inspired by the great processions of CN rolling stock that daily go past my studio to the marshalling yards nearby, but this piece is certainly not just a representation of this. I too have been deeply affected by the Italian Renaissance painter Andrea Mantegna’s great horizontal paintings of processions and reclining gods. Lastly, I must acknowledge that the example of the modern British sculptor Anthony Caro’s After Olympia which, whilst not being a particular influence on the form of my piece, did in general terms seem to me a statement that should not go unanswered."