- Artist
- David Annesley born 1936
- Medium
- Painted steel
- Dimensions
- Object: 1283 × 1759 × 368 mm
- Collection
- Tate
- Acquisition
- Presented by Alistair McAlpine (later Lord McAlpine of West Green) 1970
- Reference
- T01340
Catalogue entry
David Annesley b. 1936
T01340 Swing Low 1964
Not inscribed.
Painted steel, 50½ x 69¼ x 14¼ (128.5 x 176 x 37).
Presented by Alistair McAlpine 1971.
Exh: The New Generation: 1965, Whitechapel Gallery, March-April 1965 (1); The Alistair McAlpine Gift, Tate Gallery, June-August 1971 (2, repr.).
Lit: Anne Seymour, in catalogue of The Alistair McAlpine Gift, 1971, pp. 37-48, repr. p. 40.
The surface of these sculptures is explicitly non-tactile. The skin of paint which makes it more or less anonymous was also a reaction both to the craggy surfaces of the bronzes of the fifties and to the iron industrial flavour of Annesley’s first welded pieces. It was something comparable to the movement away from Abstract Expressionism going on in painting. Nevertheless the material was not unimportant. Annesley uses its taut qualities, as in ‘Jump’. In ‘X-Act’ and ‘Swing Low’ metal registers as both fluid and rigid at the same time, as it also does in the later rippling circular pieces (e.g. T01347, T01348). Annesley explained steel was ‘neutral— just stuft’ while at the same time ‘the most flexible, durable material you could use’. The material itself did not influence the form a sculpture took, though of course he knew what sort of pieces would be available.
The sculpture is one of an edition of three. Another copy is in the collection of the Calouste Gulbcnkian Foundation.
Published in The Tate Gallery Report 1970–1972, London 1972.
Explore
- abstraction(8,615)
-
- non-representational(6,161)
- formal qualities(12,454)
-
- movement(172)
- energy(101)