
A Beat, 2013 - Francis Upritchard
about this work
Looking strikingly like hippies from the late 1960s and evocative of medieval jesters and holy fools, Francis Upritchard's figures are both archetypal and beautifully decorative. Upritchard associates hippies with failure that everything embraced and envisioned by the 1960s counterculture either ended unhappily or didn't materialise. Nonetheless, her apparent rejection of these ideals, as expressed in the disenchantment of her sculpted figures, is itself significant, for Upritchard's discomfort with the aspirations of the counterculture may also disguise a deeper longing for their achievement.
To accompany the ICA Off-Site group exhibition A Journey Through London Subculture: 1980s to Now, Francis Upritchard has created the edition A Beat (2013).