Los Hadeans VI

Los Hadeans VI is one of a group of seven hand-painted bronze sculptures created by Rebecca Warren in 2017. The title is a reference to the geological term that describes the hot molten epoch in Earth’s earliest existence.

The sculpture appears like a stalagmite built up from minerals, or from an ancient eruption of hot and fundamental substances. This figure – like a proto-being – appears as if it’s made from petrified stone rather than bronze. By contrast, the light, delicate strokes of paint, the hint of buttons on the front of the sculpture, and the petal pink plinth fix it somewhere else, somewhere more in our own time. Warren wanted to place this particular sculpture in the museum because of its resonance with the antiquities and also with the more modern objects that it houses.

[Warren’s] sculptures themselves have undulating surfaces that feel at once amorphous (like the skin of a thickly magmatic brew) and haptic (shaped by the artist’s hands, with imprints of the fingers’ tips and the hand’s gripping palm).

Jorg Heiser, p.5, Rebecca Warren, Bronze Heads and Hair Bows, Galerie Max Hetzler, 2012

Rebecca Warren OBE RA (b.1965) is one of the most important British sculptors working today. Her broad creative palette includes modernist and pop cultural influences, as well as an interest in the ancient and the uncanny. Her predominantly female figures range from curvaceous and animated to the slender, still and abstract. She was born in London and studied at Goldsmith’s College and the Chelsea College of Art. From 1993 to 1994, Warren was an artist-in-residence at The Ruskin School at the University of Oxford. She was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2006, and the Vincent Award in 2008. Solo exhibitions have been held at The Kunsthalle Zürich work in 2004; the Serpentine Gallery, London in 2009; and the Kunstverein Munich in 2013. In 2016, the Dallas Museum of Art hosted a major exhibition, Rebecca Warren: The Main Feeling, her first solo museum show in the USA. Other major shows followed at Tate St Ives in 2017 and Belvedere 21, Vienna, Austria in 2022.

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