3/F, 27 Huqiu Road, Huangpu District, 200002, Shanghai, China
Open: Tue-Sat 11am-7pm
Artist: Lynn Chadwick
Curated by Matthieu Poirier
Launched in 2024, the three-continent, three-chapter retrospective Hypercycle comes to a close here with its final chapter, devoted to the period in which Chadwick's work reaches its fullest maturity. Vigilants brings together sculptures from the late period of the artist's career (1978–1995), in which several long-running ideas and series, most of them initiated around 1950, are carried to their furthest and most fully realized and acknowledged point.
Installed in Shanghai, these watchful figures find a distant yet legible echo in Chinese traditions of the standing or paired guardian: the ranked terracotta soldiers made to hold their posts indefinitely, the pairs of stone lions charged with watching a threshold rather than a scene, the ever-staring taotie mask, the hybrid zhenmushou placed at the entrance to a tomb. The kinship is formal rather than historical: both traditions ask a figure to do one thing without end, which is to keep watch and so to outlast the moment of its making.
The oculus, the circular or eye-shaped opening present since Chadwick's earliest works, is refined here into a more deliberate instrument of relation: these late apertures are designed to hold a gaze rather than merely suggest one. Across the solitary figures and the couples that recur throughout his oeuvre, whether standing or seated, his late work favors a kind of frontal permanence. These are bodies composed to be looked at for a long time, returning that duration rather than a single instant.
The draped, cloaked silhouettes that first emerged earlier in his career develop into fuller, heavier volumes. Their folds read less as costume than as accumulated energy or mass, the visible trace of time settling onto a body that no longer moves.
The mirror-polishing of bronze surfaces, introduced gradually over the preceding decades, here becomes a sustained and deliberate technique. Entire planes of the body turn reflective, drawing the surrounding space and the viewer's own presence into the surface of the sculpture.
In these final works, figures that have long kept watch ask only to be watched in return. Hypercycle thus closes not on a resolution but on an enduring act of attention, one that may well outlast us and remain eternally turned toward an ever-changing world.
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