Peter Hide: Standing Sculpture

Peter Hide: Standing Sculpture will be the first publication to survey the upright monolithic constructed steel sculptures Hide has been making since the mid-seventies. Richly illustrated with an essay by Sam Cornish it will chart the development of this important body of work and situate it within the recent history sculpture in Britain.The richness of these sculptures involves a series of interwoven oppositions: between the ancient history of the standing sculpted figure and the non-referential imperatives of the century-old tradition of constructed sculpture; between refinement and a rough, at times near brutal sensibility; and between the freedom of formal experimentation and a feeling of restriction. Hide retains a sense of the importance of formal progression central to the Anglo-American high modernism of the sixties, but his sculptures can also be understood as defiant monuments to the fading away of this sensibility.