§ PAUL NEAGU (ROMANIAN/BRITISH 1938-2004) HUMAN FOOT SHADOW, 1973 Signed, inscribed with title and dated '73 lower left, further inscribed 'Human Foot, 35 cells, GENERATIVE ART GROUP', mixed media on paper(39cm x 27cm (15.25in x 10.5in))Provenance: Gifted by the artist to Silvia Radu and Vasile Gorduz, Romanian artists and close friends of Neagu (work bears inscription from Neagu to the pair verso); Gifted by Silvia Radu to the present ownerFootnote: Note: Paul Neagu’s legacy within the UK artworld is one of quiet but profound impact, with the generation of students he taught – Rachel Whiteread, Antony Gormley and Anish Kapoor (who authored his obituary), attesting to his influence on their own work. His artistic practice was underpinned by his personal philosophical theory of the world; a sophisticated if esoteric approach which, though valued by curators, institutions and centres of education here from the early stages of his career, was out of step with his contemporaries at the time. As a Romanian émigré, Neagu’s output inevitably had a cross-cultural outlook, and his sculpture, drawings and performances were underpinned by an exploration of the metaphysical, and can be described as straddling craft and conceptualism. Though these features distinguished him and set his work apart, it also meant he did not fit within the general trends in the British art world at this point, to the detriment of his standing amongst collectors of British sculpture today. Kapoor in his tribute remarks that, “…inevitably, he struggled against a British art world that preferred to see the artist as a maker of things rather than, as he saw it, art, and therefore the artist, as a generator of a philosophical world view.” Growing up in tough conditions behind the Iron Curtain, the young Neagu enrolled at the Bucharest Institute of Fine Art in 1963. Social Realism was the official visual language under the Communist regime, and so he was forced to make forays into abstraction in secret. These constraints ultimately led to the development of his core belief that art is an expression of 'desire in the face of the systems that attempt to inhibit it'. Throughout the 1960s he developed his ‘palpable objects’: construction-like box assemblages made out of humble materials and traditional Romanian woodworking techniques; a thread to his practise which he never abandoned and can be observed in the work offered here for sale, ‘Ongoing Hyphen’. His ticket to the West came in the form of an invitation from the now legendary art impresario Richard Demarco to exhibit at his gallery in 1969. A powerhouse behind the Edinburgh Art Festival, Demarco was extraordinarily outward looking for the time and made it his mission to discover and expose talent from Eastern Europe over in the West (other names he is responsible for championing include Marina Abramovich and Joseph Beuys). Neagu settled in the UK permanently in 1970, making London his home. Before long he became a well-respected teacher, most notably lecturing at the Hornsey, the Slade and the Chelsea School of Art, and in 1976 becoming Associate Professor at the Royal College of Art. His work encompassed aspects of performance as well as drawing and construction, and explored the relationship between ritualism and sculpture, as well as spirituality. Sculpture, as Neagu saw it, was to be experienced by all five senses and had the potential to have a profound, spiritual, and potentially healing impact on its audience. In order to convey these aims, he developed specific totemic symbols which he then continued to re-work over the course of his career. The first and most significant of these was the Hyphen form. As Kapoor describes, “…in 1975, Neagu made his first Hyphen - it started life as a three-legged workbench assembled somewhat in the folk tradition of Romanian furniture. Quickly Neagu understood the immense metaphysical potential of this tripod structure. From it he evolved a complete anthropocosmic view which, in parallel with Joseph Beuys in Germany and, previously, Yves Klein in France, suggested a spiritual remedy for the ills of contemporary man.” These reference points are notably European, again underpinning that Neagu’s process was something of an anomaly within the British art movements of the period. This though, as I alluded earlier, is to the advantage of discerning collectors with a more internationalistic outlook today, as his work remains accessibly priced. Lyon & Turnbull are pleased to offer for sale ‘On-going Hyphen’, from 1992. Crafted in some of Neagu’s traditional materials, wood and gesso, it represents a later iteration of the original hyphen form, which Neagu approached again with vigour in this year. We are also pleased to offer one of his ‘human cell’ drawings, ‘Human Foot Shadow’, from 1973 – a further aspect of his ‘Anthropocosmic’ concept which he developed in the early 1970s. In 2003 Tate Britain acquired Neagu’s 30-year archive and exhibited some of his work from the 1970s and 1980s, and his work can be found in public collections including, among others, the British Museum, London, le Fond départemental d'art contemporain, Seine Saint-Denis, Bobigny, France, the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, Dublin, the Musee Cantonal de Beaux Arts, Lausanne, Switzerland, the National Museum of Art of Romania, Bucharest, the Philadelphia Art Museum, Philadelphia, USA, and the Tate Gallery, London.
