Footnotes

Provenance
The Artist's Estate
Sale; Sotheby's, London, 30 September 2015, lot 41, where acquired by the present owner
Private Collection, U.K.

Helen Chadwick was a trailblazing figure in late twentieth-century British art, celebrated for her fearless engagement with the body, desire, and the abject. Born in Croydon to an English father and a Greek refugee mother, she initially struggled with formal education, (notably failing her art O Level), yet went on to study at Brighton Polytechnic and make an indelible mark on contemporary art. In 1987, she became the first woman nominated for the Turner Prize, followed by a solo exhibition at MoMA in 1995. Alongside her prolific practice, she was a much-loved and admired tutor at institutions including the RCA, Goldsmiths, Chelsea and Central Saint Martins, where she influenced artists such as Tracey Emin, Sarah Lucas, and Anya Gallaccio. Her sudden death at the age of forty-two cut short a career at its peak.

Chadwick's practice was defined by her rejection of traditional hierarchies of material. She worked with an extraordinary range of substances, such as snow, food, engine oil, animal carcasses, chocolate, urine, flowers, fur and bronze to name a few, often testing the boundaries between attraction and repulsion. Her work frequently engaged with ideas of the "abject", a concept central to feminist thought, conjuring the unstable space between desire and disgust, seduction and alienation. Always visually seductive, her works pulled viewers close, only to confront them with ambiguity, strangeness, and unease.

The Meat Abstracts series, made in the late 1980s, encapsulates these concerns. Using a large-format Polaroid camera, Chadwick created compositions of raw meat, (steak, tripe, offal, hearts and kidneys), arranged on sumptuous grounds of silk, velvet, leather or fur, sometimes accompanied by cutlery or reflective spheres. A glowing light bulb illuminates each scene, occasionally buried within the flesh, at other times casting dramatic silhouettes. Photographed directly from above, the images flatten into a shallow plane of focus, emphasising both texture and surface. At once sumptuous and unsettling, the works recall the theatricality of seventeenth-century still lifes while charging them with corporeal intensity.

Chadwick described the series as a way of reanimating inert matter, drawing inspiration from the gothic imagination of Frankenstein and the body horror of David Cronenberg. The Meat Abstracts occupy a charged space between beauty and decay, seduction and revulsion, life and death. They remain among her most provocative works, emblematic of her ability to transform the familiar and the discarded into profound meditations on the human condition.