When Phyllida Barlow passed away in 2023, aged 78, it ended a six-decade career of sculptural work that had crescendoed in prestige, reception, and celebration. Despite a life of making and teaching art, her work only reached the recognition and status it deserved following her retirement from teaching in 2009, of which twenty years were spent at the Slade School of Fine Art supporting students including Tacita Dean, Douglas Gordan, and Rachel Whiteread.

Barlow’s own work drew from her surroundings to create singularly recognisable sculptural projects, often of a scale to match their immense ambition and creativity. Her approach was architectural in scale and form, often inhabiting spaces in formally reflective and playful ways. She did not create a kind of sculpture that could be stepped back from and admired from received gaze, but one which unfolds and reveals through choreography and movement within and around monumental forms.


Her late rise to recognition was cemented with two seminal exhibitions. In 2014 Barlow created dock, an enormous sequence of precarious-looking timber structures, piles, and assemblages that filled the Duveen Gallery of Tate Britain. In 2017, folly erupted within the ordered rooms of the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale of Art with chaotic constructions, faux-material, unexpected interjections, and a huge dollop of theatrical play.

Some of the sculptural components of these two exhibitions are currently presented as part of unscripted, a posthumous retrospective at Hauser & Wirth Somerset. Such pieces cannot simply be reinstalled to match their original presentations, such was Barlow’s conflation of architectural context and installation, but curator Frances Morris worked with Barlow’s studio staff to position the sculptures to spatially work and reveal in similar ways to the artist’s original intent, albeit in strikingly different architectural surroundings.



If you can’t make it to Somerset to see the exhibition before it ends on 5 January, a new publication from the gallery in collaboration with Fruitmarket Publishing, the imprint from Edinburgh’s gallery of the same name, presents the Hauser & Wirth presentation and much more besides. Phyllida Barlow: Sculpture, 1963-2023 is a revised and expanded edition of a 2015 book published to coincide with a major exhibition the artist presented in the Scottish gallery, and its expansion now allowing inclusion of the 2017 Venice project as well as several other pieces produced in the prolific later periods of the artist’s life including for the London’s Royal Academy of Arts and New York’s High Line.

The book’s text, by Frances Morris, is similarly expanded and revised, incorporating three new chapters within a publication thematically breaking the artist’s work through the subjects of home, college,room, location, studio, museum, and gallery. It is no accident that these themed chapters are rooted in place – Barlow’s work was not only architectural in scale, but was borne of deep consideration to the visitor’s reading of and journey through space, sensorial experience of surface, durational reading of forms, and structural exploration.



For set, the 2015 Fruitmarket exhibition which partnered the first edition of this publication (the curator of the show, Fiona Bradley, is also the editor of the book) Barlow’s use of the staircase connecting the two gallery floors was central to her exploration of the architecture and with the visitor’s passage through both it and her sculptures and their recollection of one space within the other.

Morris writes of this use of space: “The invitation to carry the memory of one gallery through to the other, above or below, activates the installation’s narrative drama – its contrasts – between inside and outside, centre and margin, open and closed, painting and sculpture, structure and decoration.”



Though Barlow’s work in many ways belies its capture and legibility through photography – such 3D experiences cannot easily translate into a flattening crop – the book is richly illustrated throughout to present the artist’s work not only in gallery settings, but also in workshops and studios to rural and urban landscapes. These sites are varied: Neoclassical architecture, a quarry, brick vaults, white-wall galleries, a concrete post-industrial warehouse, a semi-derelict shed, the High Line, farmyard barns, cavernous halls and compact corridors, towering woodlands, pastoral grassland, and domestic rooms. The book is as much a visual study of the context of Barlow’s work, and how the artist playfully tested the architectural and landscape conditions of each place, as it is of the sculpture itself.

Barlow’s work is intrinsically architectural, and not only in her reading of space, situations and within the places for which she made work, but its very material itself. An artist who loved playing with expectations, Barlow enjoyed illusionary deception: seemingly heavy objects defying gravity, what reads as concrete revealing as papier mâché or bundled rags, and elements precariously teetering on the edge of structure, as if the whole work could collapse at any moment. This is all rooted in Barlow’s deep fascination with appearances, insides, and the threshold between construction and destruction.


   

In Home, the first of her texts in the book, Frances Morris writes about Phyllida Barlow’s arrival into London as a child: “raw with the damage of World War II bombs and scarred too by the ravages of rebuilding, a city of soot and bricks, profoundly monochrome.” She then shifts to the 1960 as Barlow enrolled at Chelsea School of Art, as King’s Road was being transformed into a place of cultural exuberance: “old shops were ripped apart to make way for the new boutiques of 1960s Chelsea, incidentally providing a treasure trove of building waste, more than sufficient to feed a generation of students hungry to explore the then vogue for assemblage.”

Phyllida Barlow’s exploration of assemblage went beyond the vogue, and decades later became vogue again as she rightfully received recognition, awards, and opportunity presented to many contemporary and younger artists – including those she educated. Phyllida Barlow: Sculpture, 1963-2023 packs that personal narrative arc into 304 pages and acts as an important celebration and archive of a great artist’s exploration of space, material, and place.