Michael Sandle is widely recognized as one of the world’s finest sculptors and Art Space Gallery is delighted to present this highly focused survey of sculptures, drawings and prints from the 1980’s to the present day.

Sandle is one of the few contemporary artists to tackle the most momentous subject of the 20th century – warfare. Themes of combat, death, destruction, inhumanity and media manipulation are constant in the work as he treads a path outside of the fashionable mainstream. In the catalogue essay for the exhibition Tess Jaray has written, 

“…Such a turbulent violent raging against war….He presents questions about the morality of art, but no easy answers are offered. And does that matter?  Nobility, glory and power are also there in the work. But it is never calm, well tempered, kindly or polite. Rather, brutal and ferocious. Never ordinary, never average, never compromising. Sometimes bungled or clumsy or crude, but also grand, aspirational, even compassionate.”

Born in 1936 Sandle studied at Douglas School of Art and Technology, Isle of Man and the Slade School of Fine Art. Periods of teaching in leading British art schools throughout the 1960s were followed by a three year period in Canada as visiting Professor at the University of Calgary and the University of British Columbia. In 1973 he moved to Germany where, in 1980, he was appointed Professor of Sculpture at the Akadenmie der Bildenden Kunste, Karlsruhe. Elected Royal Academician in 1989 and Fellow of the Royal Society of British Sculptors in 1994 he returned to the UK and now lives and works in London.

Michael Sandle has exhibited widely and undertaken many commissions, the most significant being the Memorial of the Victims of a Helicopter Disaster, Mannheim (1985), the semi-architectural Malta Seige-Bell Memorial at Valletta, and in London, the Memorial to the World’s Seafarers for the world headquarters of the International Maritime Organisation. A ‘retrospective’ on the scale of this exhibition can only show a fraction of Michael Sandle’s colossal achievement as sculptor, draughtsman and printmaker, but by showing a representative selection of works spanning three decades our aim is to help foster a proper understanding of his place in British art.
           
Michael Sandle, elected an RA in 1989, resigned from the Royal Academy in 1997 in protest at the ‘Sensation’ show of Young British Artists, specifically for its inclusion of Marcus Harvey’s Myra Hindley portrait. Re-elected in 2004, he won the 2008 Hugh Casson Drawing Prize with the Iraq Triptych showing Tony and Cherie Blair naked, expelled from the Eden of 10 Downing Street, surrounded by symbolic images of the war.

A catalogue accompanies the exhibition with 14 colour plates and text by Tess Jaray.

Read the text by Tess Jaray

image details:
Top:           Der Minister für Propaganda, 1981, bronze, 35 x 40 x 125cm
Bottom:      WW I Ghosts Suite V, 2005, etching & aquatint, 58 x 70 cm