ART NOUVEAU Sculpture by the former designer Nicole Farhi takes centre-stage in two compelling exhibitions this spring
How fashioning a second career has given Nicole Farhi fresh inspiration
Nicole Farhi is in her Hampstead home reflecting on her early days as a fulltime sculptor, after she swapped fashion for fine art seven years ago. ‘I used to put on Maria Callas to get me in the mood… But now I don’t play records in the studio. I am just with the bodies, the materials and my thoughts,’ she says, her French accent still delightfully strong, even after 40 years of living in Britain.
Farhi’s portrayals of individual parts of the human body can be found in two very different exhibitions this month. At ‘Folds’ in Mayfair’s Beaux Arts gallery, she is showcasing life-size depictions of the rolling curves of two comparatively unknown women: Sue Tilley, a former muse of Lucian Freud, immortalised in his painting Benefits Supervisor Sleeping; and Tilley’s friend Paola Barone. ‘I see a particular beauty in fragments of the human form,’ says Farhi. ‘Taken out of the context of the whole body, I find the shape of a breast, the fold of a stomach or the curve of a back, thrilling.’ She revelled in working with Tilley and Barone: ‘They were larger than life in every sense – gregarious, funny, sensual.’ Farhi chose to mould torsos out of white jesmonite, and even glass, to lend their bodies a sense of purity. Others will be cast in bronze with a matt black patina. ‘I wanted to explore the drama of their physicality and sexual energy,’ she explains. The results are raw, and have such presence that she was inspired to name each work after a heroine of classical mythology, including Ceres, Cybele and Hebe. ‘I think I found similarities between my earthly goddesses and those powerful deities… particularly those that personify fertility, mother Earth, love and pleasure.’ Meanwhile, at the painter Gainsborough’s childhood home-turned-museum in Sudbury, Farhi will display busts of artists she admires, such as Bacon and Freud, alongside those of friends including Helena Bonham Carter and Judi Dench. Visitors will also find neverbefore-seen depictions of Ibsen, Chekhov and Oscar Wilde in the exhibition: Farhi creates small heads of the protagonists or authors of the plays her husband, the dramatist and director David Hare, is working on, in an endearing gesture of support.
The artist is relishing her second career, and the experimentation that comes with it. ‘You have total freedom,’ she says, laughing. ‘And there’s still so much to learn. This is what I want to do now for the rest of my life.’
‘Folds’ is at Beaux Arts (www.beauxartslondon.co.uk) until 2 March; ‘Heads and Hands’ is at Gainsborough’s House (www.gainsborough. org) from 23 February to 16 June.