Spring is always the season of new growth and horticultural blossoming, but the paths, pastures, and glasshouses ofKew Gardenshave been struck by a rather different arrival this year. Across the 320 acres of gardens, 30 monumental sculptures by Henry Moore have taken root – their bronze, curving forms appearing like aliens or spaceships touched down in England’s green and pleasant land.
Brilliantly full of bothwell-known worksand unexpected gems,Monumental Natureis the largest outdoor exhibition of Moore’s work to date. Its span is huge, ranging from the artist’s earliest monumental bronzes made in the 1950s all the way through to his 1980s experiments in fibreglass forms, made just before he died in 1986. An exhibition-within-an-exhibition at the Shirley Sherwood Gallery Botanical Art shows offMoore’s smaller models, maquettes and works on paper – including early drawings from the 1930s, and rarely-seen sculptures in more experimental materials like silver and terracotta.
Much has been made of Moore’s love of the natural environment; his affirmation that “sculpture is an art of the open air”, and “its best setting and complement is nature”. The installation at Kew has taken Moore’s maxims to heart. As I approached the slippery, oval shapes ofLarge Two Forms(1969) – a work which shifts and changes depending on the angle you see it from – I was surrounded by a gaggle of fellow critics: geese, pecking at the grass in the sculpture’s shadow. One work,Sheep Piece(1971-2), which hints obliquely at the form of an ewe with her lamb, bears the patina and marks of the sheep which rubbed up against it when Moore placed it in a field near his home in Hertfordshire.
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In parts of the show, Moore’s love of natural forms seems to run counter to the Victorian splendour of Kew. One of his bone-like pieces,Three Piece Sculpture: Vertebrae(1968-69), sits in front of the Palm House. Moore’s irregular, undulating tripartite form seems to echo – or mock – the pane-glass and wrought-iron symmetry of the older building.
Moore is perhaps best known for his“Mother and Child” sculptures, where one form cradles, holds, or engulfs another. It’s a motif which is not as domestic as it sounds – Moore’s maternal forms verge on the menacing, and are bound up with his ideas of armour and protection. One reclining iteration from 1975-6 on show at Kew renders the child as an angular, jagged outpost of the mother.
But having seen the riches of Kew’s smaller exhibition – full of examples embryonic forms contained within plaster bodies, and anthropomorphic, natural figures – it’s hard not to think of new life and things growing. With the sheer breadth of work on show, this is an exhibition which allows Moore’s work to be seen anew.
Monumental Nature, Kew Gardens, until Jan 31;kew.org
