"I wanted to produce a sort of touchable object, a tangible object, to have some reality in front of me.", Lynn Chadwick
Lynn Chadwick CBE, RA (November 24, 1914 – April 25, 2003) was a British sculptor, born in Barnes, London. He had no formal art training; the family pushed him into an architect's office, where he worked as a draughtsman until the Second World War, when he served as a Fleet Air Arm pilot. He returned to civilian life with no particular plan to become a sculptor, won a 1946 textile design competition judged by Henry Moore and Graham Sutherland, and began making the wire-and-balsa-wood mobiles that constituted his first sculpture in 1947. His first mobile exhibition opened at Charles and Peter Gimpel's London gallery in August 1949, followed by a solo show the following year.
His 1956 representation of Britain at the XXVIII Venice Biennale produced the surprise International Sculpture Prize victory that, at forty-one, made him the youngest ever recipient and beat the favoured Alberto Giacometti, César Baldaccini, and Germaine Richier. The win established him as the natural successor to Moore in the public conversation about British sculpture, and his subsequent career produced a long sequence of figurative bronzes, standing and seated couples, robed and hooded figures, beasts, and architectural-totemic forms, that became among the most recognizable works of postwar British sculpture. He was appointed CBE in 1964, bought the manor house Lypiatt Park outside Stroud in 1958 (where he lived for the rest of his life), and was given a major retrospective at Tate Britain in the year of his death. His work is held in essentially every major collection of postwar art, including the Tate, the Museum of Modern Art, the Centre Pompidou, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, the Hirshhorn, and the Israel Museum.