Iron Composition is a unique sculpture, made in an early period of Lynn Chadwick’s career when he was developing a reputation as one of the leading sculptors of his generation. Works such as this helped to secure his inclusion in the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 1956, when he was awarded the International Prize for Sculpture. The construction of Iron Composition is highly complex, employing a mixture of materials and using forms that suggest representation while remaining irregular and non-imitative. While the quadruped format implies an animal form, the legs are spindly, faceted and non-naturalistic. The relation of masses is purposefully imbalanced, suggesting a composite creature: the central flattened upright mass has a large perforation at its centre, through which reaches an armature carrying the flat, oval-shaped disc that stands in parallel to the central mass; the front lip of the sculpture is studded with long, fang-like stalagmites, which erupt like teeth from a jaw.

This work is made using the industrial material called Stolit, a plaster-like substance commonly known as ‘artificial stone’ composed of gypsum and iron filings. Chadwick used it from the early 1950s and it came to characterise the richly textured surface of his sculpture. The structure of a composition was determined by a rigid armature of straight iron rods, which Chadwick welded together, and Stolit was then loaded into this framework before being smoothed and shaped. Speaking in 1995, Chadwick explained that he used to smooth the material with a spatula and then create surface texture using a plasterer’s comb, producing with this instrument some of the finely grained detailing apparent in the surface of Iron Composition and other works of the period. He also explained that the iron armature itself, protruding through the surface in many areas of Iron Composition, creates a key element of texture in the Stolit surface.

Chadwick worked with Stolit in both larger outdoor works and smaller, domestic scale sculptures. Many of these were later treated as maquettes from which a moulding was taken and with which a bronze casting was then made. The detailed surface qualities of the artist’s Stolit-made sculptures are often apparent in his bronzes, a translation of the refined finish that Chadwick achieved in the original hand-worked object. However, it was not until 1956 that he started to make bronze castings from Stolit originals and Iron Composition was intended to be a finished presentation work, likeable to other small-scale works such as Conjunction (fig. 1), for example.

In an important exhibition held at the Barbican Art Gallery in 2022, Postwar Modern: New Art in Britain, Chadwick’s work was shown with art that imagined the world after a nuclear holocaust. The exhibition curator Jane Alison fancied Chadwick’s work as ‘richly imagined bestial creatures’ that represent ‘an uneasy return of life to wasteland Britain’. The irregular, monstrous shapes of his work were exhibited alongside ‘birdman’ works by Elizabeth Frink and collages of organic imagery by Nigel Henderson. Though his art does reflect more general, period-specific anxieties, the particularity of forms in Chadwick’s sculpture grew from more various, more specific artistic concerns. The abstract quality of the underlying ironwork armature set in train a series of formal operations, while Chadwick’s affinity with the natural environment imbues early works such as Iron Composition with vivid organic imagery. Taken as a whole, this sculpture is neither wholly literal nor wholly abstract, successfully reconciling formal concerns with an interest in subject content and thus achieving a meaningful suggestiveness.