Sotheby’s to Host the First-Ever London Exhibition of a Major Collection of 20th Century British Art

LONDON.- Sotheby’s London announces the opening on January 10th 2011, in partnership with awardwinning gallery The Lightbox, of an exhibition featuring sculptures and sculptors’ drawings from a major collection of 20th Century British Art, The Ingram Collection. Forty specially selected works by prominent artists including pieces by Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore, Elisabeth Frink, Kenneth Armitage and Eduardo Paolozzi will be on display in Sotheby’s New Bond Street galleries.

To accompany the works on show, photographs of the artists taken by Jorge Lewinski over the course of the last forty years will also be exhibited. This special exhibition offers a wonderful opportunity to study a survey of sculpture by the era’s leading artistic figures. A ticketed reception will be held on Wednesday 19th January which will be attended by The Right Honourable Jeremy Hunt, MP and Secretary of State for Culture, Olympics, Media and Sport.

Speaking about the forthcoming exhibition, James Rawlin, Senior Director of 20th Century British Art at Sotheby’s, comments: “We are incredibly proud to host this exhibition which brings to the public eye some of the twentieth century’s greatest British sculptors. Not only is this a timely exhibit – given the growing interest in three-dimensional works from this period – but the exhibition precedes the first exhibition in thirty years to examine British sculpture of the twentieth century at the Royal Academy. The Ingram Collection is a perfect introduction to some of the best works of this era.”

THE INGRAM COLLECTION
The Ingram Collection of Modern British Art, on loan to The Lightbox, consists of over 300 pieces and has been assembled over the course of the last decade, with 65 additions in the last 18 months. It represents an exemplary showcase of some of the finest examples of works by British artists, with particular reference to the post-war period. Chris Ingram, a media entrepreneur and owner of Woking Football Club, attributes his passion for this particular era of artistic creativity, commenting, “The edgy, challenging (and sometimes downright grim) work prompted by two World Wars and the threadbare 50s appealed to me. There is the cross-over between figurative and abstract that occupied some artists, for example Keith Vaughan; the unique three-dimensional feel that our great sculptors Moore and Hepworth bring to their works on paper; the multi-layered works that you can look at again and again, or the sheer craftsmanship of artists like Eric Ravilious.”

PHOTOGRAPHS BY JORGE LEWINSKI
Jorge Lewinski has been photographing artists since the early 1960s. As an aspiring young photographer he chose not celebrities, actors or writers as his subject matter but artists, his fellow image-makers. Over the last forty years he has photographed over three hundred artists, often returning to photograph the same person over a number of years, and has developed an evolving portrait not only of the artists themselves but also the changing styles of British art in this remarkable period. His retrospective at Sotheby’s in January 2004 brought together a large cross-section of Lewinski’s portraits of artists since 1962. The Jorge Lewinski Archive of over 15,000 negatives is housed at Chatsworth.