Encounter VII, 1957 is one of the largest and most striking of Chadwick’s unique works from the 1950s. With its twisted and contorted shell-like body and insect-like heads, which inquisitively face one anther, atop needle-sharp legs, it stands as a dichotomy between abstraction and the figurative, with Chadwick pushing the boundaries of 20th Century British sculpture.
Conceived in 1957, after two pivotal Venice Biennales, the work is representative of a seminal moment in Chadwick’s career.
The first Biennale, of 1952, at the invitation of the British Council to exhibit four sculptures in the British Pavilion, launched Chadwick’s work before an international audience. With its sharp angular contours and insect-like form, Encounter VII characterises in many ways the consciousness of the new generation of British sculpture that emerged in the 1950s. Chadwick was one of the eight younger artists who formed New Aspects of British Sculpture including: Kenneth Armitage, Reg Butler, Robert Adams, Geoffrey Clarke, Bernard Meadows, Eduardo Paolozzi and William Turnbull. In his introduction to the catalogue for the exhibition, Herbert Read wrote, ‘These new images belong to the iconography of despair or of defiance; and the more innocence of the artist, the more effectively he transmits the collective guilt. Here are images of flight, of ragged claws … of excoriated flesh, frustrated sex, the geometry of fear … Although the phrase ‘geometry of fear’ generalized what was an exhibition of greatly differing artists and styles, what it did signify was the recognition of the emergence of a new aesthetic in British sculpture. The surface of a new sculptural vernacular was also picked up by critics, who called the British Pavilion, ‘the most vital, the most brilliant, and the most promising in the whole Biennale' (R. Calvocoressi, exhibition catalogue, British Sculpture in the Twentieth Century, London, Whitechapel Art Gallery, 1981, p. 143). Read’s raw and violent description of these young sculptors work also acknowledged and reflected the deeply troubling age in which they were working. Created in a world still recovering from the Second World War and a political climate seemingly teetering on the edge of nuclear war, Chadwick’s Encounter VII and its post-apocalyptic form conjures images both of the blackened devastation of an atomic bomb and the living creatures which one might imagine could mutate from such an event.
Subsequently, at the 1956 Biennale, Chadwick became the youngest post-war artist to win the prize for sculpture, with his nineteen sculptures and twenty drawings produced between 1951 and 1956, judged to be worthier of the prize than Giacometti, the favorite, who came second. The result of this significantly transitional moment in Chadwick’s career manifests itself here in an ethereal delicate beauty, which is highlighted through Chadwick’s elongated, elegant asymmetrical forms, which poetically interlock with one another, becoming one body. Encounter VII indicates a rapid development towards Chadwick’s mature idiom, presaging too his subsequent preoccupation with standing figures and groups.
What is also notable here is Chadwick’s play with material, leaving visible in the cast bronze the texture his iron and composition medium, to create his multi-faceted, contorted, almost armored forms, delighting in the interplay between solid and void. ‘An elaborate and carefully constructed web of welded rods ... form triangular units that are joined together at various angles to express the planes and sharp contours of [its] body, the whole supported on four thinly tapered forged legs ... the interstices of this web are filled with 'Stolit', an industrial artificial stone compound of gypsum and iron powder, which is applied wet like plaster and which, on drying, sets glass-hard. The ribbed texture produced by this method imparts a fossilized look to the sculpture that suggests some skeletal prehistoric creature. The effect is at once eerie and startling' (D. Farr and E. Chadwick, op. cit., p. 22).