In 1964, Barry Flanagan (1941-2009) had already received a classical art education in Birmingham, held all sorts of odd jobs and had hung out with poets. When he moved to London, he started a small avant-garde magazine Silâns. That’s when Barry met Jarry.
Picking up an issue of the Evergreen Review devoted to ‘Pataphysics’ that a poet friend had given him in 1962, Flanagan was delighted by the extracts from the Exploits and Opinions of Dr Faustroll, Pataphysician by Alfred Jarry. This ‘revelation’ of the ‘science of imaginary solutions’ and the discovery of the saga of Jarry’s Père Ubu would inform much of what he would create over the next 45 years.
Like Alfred Jarry (1873-1907), independence and radical creative freedom is the thread that runs through his work. Unpredictable and unclassifiable, subtle and deadpan, and practising the art of the wink, is the artist who will be (re)discovered through this selection of sculptures, textile works, drawings and prints brought together in collaboration with the Barry Flanagan Estate.
