Rebecca Warren

Ranging from the amorphous to more clearly recognisable forms, Rebecca Warren’s sculptures create a bold new figure for the female nude. Her subject is one of the most traditional in art history, but she subverts the inherited cliches associated with the genre, redefining what sculpture should be or should look like. With their earthy, unfired and unfinished look, they unveil a tension between thought and process, while creating a unique, new sculptural mode.

Warren, who belongs to the same generation as the YBA artists from the 1990s, has developed an aesthetic entirely her own. Clay, a very flexible medium, allows her to explore unconscious free association. “The beauty of working with a material like clay is that it gives you that freedom to change things... I like to keep the quality that they're breeding quite quickly and they're made quite quickly, that there's a sense of them perhaps not being complete, to keep them alive and dynamic and fresh”.

In her work, Warren wryly addresses her fascination with artists who have overtly fetishised the female form: photographer Helmut Newton, cartoonist Robert Crumb, and abstract expressionist Willem de Kooning. Her earth mothers quote from their imagery, and from that of and modernist sculpture, highlighting a shared interest in sexualising women’s shape by discarding heads or any personal attributes, and filtering symbols of objectification – aggressively cartoonised buttocks, nipples and postures.