Lynn Chadwick is recognized as one of the most important European sculptors of the second half of the 20th century. While he only began working as a freelance sculptor in the late 1940s, his unwavering artistic endeavors were rewarded with great success at an early stage. In 1952, he and Kenneth Armitage represented Great Britain at the Venice Biennale. The exhibition “New Aspects of British Sculpture” was immediately met with international acclaim. In 1956, he was awarded the International Prize for Sculpture at the 28th Venice Biennale.
From the early 1950s, Chadwick primarily explored the physical presence of human and animal bodies in compositions consisting of one or more figures, placing his edgy hybrid creatures on delicate, thin legs. This approach has always been part of his characteristic formal vocabulary. These abstracted bodies, often with neither arms nor facial features and occasionally incorporating geometric elements, appear throughout Chadwick's six-decade-spanning sculptural oeuvre.

The first copies of his two-figure works date back to the 1950s, including “Conjunction” (1953, Tate Gallery), which was to be a recurring theme throughout his entire career. These works and the pieces from the “Jubilee” series starting in 1977 are among the artist's most famous creations. In the 1980s, he created further variations of the “Jubilee” figure pairs, a striding female and male figure with flowing cloaks. In a wide range of forms and sizes, Chadwick imbues these sculptures with a fascinating dynamism, even a sense of movement, while simultaneously exploring their intriguing relationship. They stride confidently and purposefully, their robes flapping in the wind as if walking in step with each other. The two figures are united by their parallel postures, movements, liveliness, and robes, yet they are clearly distinguishable. From the 1970s onwards, Chadwick often provided his figures with head shapes that indicated gender using geometric forms, such as pyramids or triangles for females and squares or cubes for males. In “Maquette III Jubilee III”, the female forms of the right-hand figure are also emphasized.

The bronzes from the “Jubilee” group illustrate Chadwick's extraordinary artistic ingenuity, his inimitable style, and the one-of-a-kind visual vocabulary of his later works from the 1970s and 80s. They mark a pinnacle of Chadwick's sculptural creation within an oeuvre that had a profound impact on the aesthetics of sculpture in European post-war art. This may explain why the monumental bronze “Jubilee IV” (1985) fetched $3,300,000 at an auction in New York in 2023, making it the second-highest price ever paid for a work by the artist. [CH]