LYNN CHADWICK: HYPERCYCLE / CHAPTER II: ARCHETYPE (1963-1977)
PERROTIN is pleased to present Hypercycle / Chapter II: Archetype (1963-1977), Lynn Chadwick’s current exhibition.
October 30 - December 20, 2025
With their naturalism, near-abstract geometry, and spectral silhouettes, Lynn Chadwick’s enigmatic figures left an indelible mark on 20th-century sculpture, standing alongside the works of Alberto Giacometti, Henry Moore, and Louise Bourgeois. The current exhibition, Archetype, focuses on the British artist’s mature period (1963–1977) and forms the second chapter of Hypercycle—an ambitious three-part project spanning three continents and three years, presenting more than 120 of Chadwick’s sculptures. It follows Scalene, which explored his early works (1947–1963) and was shown in 2024 in Paris at the Centre des Monuments Nationaux and at Perrotin. The third and final chapter will showcase Chadwick’s late works (1978–1995) in Asia in 2026.
In 1958, two years after winning the International Grand Prize for Sculpture at the Venice Biennale, Chadwick established his studio—and later his own foundry—at Lypiatt Manor, a secluded estate in the British Cotswolds. The former architect restored and expanded this once-ruined building, transforming it into a setting he viewed as an extension of his sculptural practice: a stage, or even a meta-work. Although the site remains private, it underlines the solemnity and gravity of his creations, which often recall primitive idols. The selection for the current exhibition draws partly on archival evidence of Chadwick’s fascination with mythology and ancestral human artifacts. The critic Herbert Read invoked Carl Gustav Jung when he described Chadwick’s art as a “geometry offear.” Among the figures from the psychoanalyst’s “collective unconscious”, Read might also have discerned the silhouettes of the Shadow, the Warrior’s armor, or the unshakeable Anima. For Jung, whose theories were rooted in the study of myths and the human psyche, archetypes are images and patterns that give form to the manifold expressions of psychic and spiritual energy.
Chadwick’s angular, faceted sculptures evoke both the constructed and the organic—architectural forms, ship sails, aircraft wings, birds, bats, skeletons, and exoskeletons. His Sitting Figures and Winged Figures transcend individuality to become archetypes: universal emblems of strength, tension, duality, and inner transformation. “Whatever the final form, the force behind it is… indivisible,” he once declared, distilling geometric, human, and animal forms down to their psychic truth and timeless essence. Often paired in symbiotic couples (Maquette II Two Sitting Figures, 1971) or assembled in groups (Five Sitting Figures 5, 1975), these figures fuse modernist abstraction with archaic essentialism. They engage both eye and hand while stirring deep mythic memory, generating tensions between instability, geometric fragmentation, material embodiment, and biomorphic abstraction. A vital energy animates this silent pantheon of imaginary archetypes—existing at the intersection of myth, biology, and mechanics—reflecting our own bodies or serving as armors into which we project ourselves to face the world, matter, and time.
To the utopian heroism of postwar modernism, Lynn Chadwick brought a troubled expressiveness and humanism. His structural archaism resonated with the reconstruction of Europe after World War II, yet never denied its destruction and scars. As a sculptor, he aligned himself with the pictorial logic of automatism, art informel, and abstract expressionism, insisting that sculpture should arise from an instinctive, pragmatic process. He worked without preparatory sketches, allowing forms to evolve organically—between mimetic realism and mathematical rigor. This approach drew him close to the then-fashionable biomorphism, which reintroduced the particularities of the living world into abstraction. The naturalism and “organic reality” Chadwick championed as early as 1955 were never symmetrical or predictable; they were shaped by tension, imbalance, and formal events. Abstract, three-legged creatures such as Triad II, Tripod II, and Tripod III (1964) or Pyramids XI (1965) approach geometry through the precarious fragility of living things, echoing the dynamic imbalance of the Beasts he had created the previous decade.