Francis Upritchard
A Beat
2013
€354,17
Digital pigment print with silkscreen and emboss.
28 × 42 cm
Edition of 50 copies, signed and numbered by the artist.
In stock
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.
about Francis Upritchard
Known primarily for her figurative sculpture, Francis Upritchard’s work is keenly observant of human nature, and treads the line between realism and fantasy. Her figures, a group of misfits and travelling players, appear to taking part in a pageant or masquerade – their expressions melancholic and distant, seemingly questing for something beyond reach.
Francis Upritchard’s work draws on figurative sculpture, craft traditions and design, blending references from literature to Japanese folklore, Indian miniatures to Romanesque frescoes, and ancient sculptures and burial grounds to science fiction. Her installations showcase a wide variety of materials; her distinctive figurative sculptures are made using polymer plastic, amorphous mythological figures in balata – a Brazilian rubber, bronze dinosaurs, glass vessels, ceramic urns and felt hats adorned with beads, badges and plastic decorations.
(courtesy of Anton Kern)
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