Ewen Henderson

In Gallery Two, S│2 London presents selected works by Staffordshire-born sculptor Ewen Henderson.

Ewen Henderson is one of the most important and influential British sculptors of his time. His work can be found in the permanent collections of some of the world’s major museums such as the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, The Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Henderson trained in pottery and ceramics under Lucie Rie and Hans Coper at the Camberwell School of Art in the 1960s. In contrast to Rie’s smooth, symmetrical works, however, Henderson saw ceramics as a form of sculpture and, therein, a site of abstraction. Abandoning the potters’ wheel, Henderson worked freehand and his style would soon be defined by irregular, asymmetrical forms and experimental glazes. Clay became the artist’s material of choice and one which he continuously reworked and reformed by adding other materials such as paper, oxides and grog.

His fondness for clay was grounded in his obsession with change: "I was seduced by the alchemy of change where you take a material ... and it is transmogrified into something else.” Henderson was fascinated both by the processes by which matter is transformed and by its resulting fissures and cracks. His work thereby places equal emphasis on that which is broken or splintered as that which is whole.

The exhibition at S│2 presents eleven sculptures executed in the late 1980s and 1990s, including works from the artist’s estate. This exhibition is organised in collaboration with Marsden Woo Gallery and Anthony Shaw, coinciding with the Ewen Henderson show: Late Abstractions curated by Anthony Shaw at Marsden Woo Gallery from 12 July – 1 September 2018.