Macmillan Coffee Morning

Free Audio Guide This is a major survey of work by Barry Flanagan, one of Britain’s most inventive sculptors, filling Ikon’s two floors of gallery space entirely. Curated by Jo Melvin, it brings together a selection of Flanagan’s iconic bronze sculptures (1980s–90s) alongside earlier works, offering new insights into the interconnectedness of seemingly distinct aspects of his practice. Demonstrating an ongoing experimentation with materials and their properties and a symbiosis between abstraction and figuration, the exhibition challenges the supposition that Flanagan’s later works represent a marked shift in his approach to art-making. Rather, they represent the distillation of his decades-long fascination with ontology, movement and the physicality of the various materials with which he worked.