Beschreibung:

Michael Ayrton (British, 1921-1975) Triptych I: Emerging Figure I, II and III, conceived in 1966 Bronze and copper wire, mounted on wood plinths Each panel 97cm high, 57cm wide overall On view at: Dreweatts Donnington Priory 'Its materials are at once dense, impenetrable, translucent and illusory. Such a total maze each man makes around himself and each is different from every other.' - Michael Ayrton The Maze Maker, first published 1967 Artistic polymath Michael Ayrton was educated at the Heatherly School of Fine Art, and the former St John's Wood Art School in London in the 1930s. Afterwards, he studied under Russian Neo-Romantic painter and set designer Eugene Berman in Paris, sharing a studio with artist John Minton Though he was active as a writer, designer, printmaker and more, he is primarily known for his sculptures. His oeuvre often features surreal, tortured interpretations of the human form, and is held by renowned galleries worldwide, including Tate, London, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Michael Ayrton was fascinated with Greek mythology over the course of his career, and particularly the myth of the inventor Daedalus and his son Icarus. The maze constructed for King Minos by the inventor, which notoriously held the Minotaur, features repeatedly in Ayrton's oeuvre. This includes for example the full scale version of the maze Ayrton built in Arkville New York, and the small bronze of the Sleeping Minotaur sold through these rooms on 3 April 2019, Modern and Contemporary Art, lot 214 The present work is another incarnation of Ayrton's preoccupation with the concept of the maze. Though they appear to be released from their panels, male figures (which, as Dr Justine Hopkins has theorised about a similar triptych, could also be the same figure at different stages of emergence), become enmeshed and trapped within a web of copper wire as they come away from the panels. An edition of the present work was sold at Christie's London, 20th Century British Art, 9 June 2006, Lot 214 and Sotheby's London, Made in Britain, 13 September 2017, Lot 191. Ink studies for the sculptures appeared on the market at Modern Art Auctions, 20th century art, 12 June, 2013, and Christie's South Kensington, Modern British & Irish Art 15 July 2015, lot 38 LITERATURE: Jacob Nyenhuis, Myth and the Creative Process; Michael Ayrton and the Myth of Daedalus, the Maze Maker, Wayne State University Press, Detroit, p. 132, Fig. 138 Peter Cannon-Brookes, Michael Ayrton An Illustrated Commentary, Birmingham, 1978, p. 113 C.P. Snow (foreword), Michael Ayrton Drawings and Sculpture, London, 1962, pl. 206