What do you get when a Welsh sculptor trades in the solemnities of stone and steel for a gold-leafed, gravity-defying rabbit that looks like it escaped from a Monty Python fever dream? You get Large Leaping Hare, a bronze middle finger to every brooding, bombastic monument that ever tried to look “important.” Barry Flanagan didn’t just sculpt a leaping hare—he launched a cultural sneak attack on the idea that Serious Art must wear a frown and weigh six metric tons. Here, his hare doesn’t sit still, doesn’t ponder existence, and certainly doesn’t care for your tortured metaphors. It vaults through the air with the unbothered elan of a champagne-soaked ballet dancer who’s ditched rehearsal for good.
At a glance, the piece feels lighthearted. But don’t be fooled. That levity is a Trojan horse—inside, you’ll find a robust challenge to modernism, minimalism, and the postwar urge to make sculpture as fun as a concrete parking garage. Flanagan’s hare mocks austerity with motion, mocks mass with poise, and mocks permanence with a wink. It’s like someone cast Bugs Bunny as a Greek god and no one told the critics. And best of all, it dares you not to smile. Spoiler: you’ll fail.
Flanagan: The Trickster Among Titans
Barry Flanagan started his career with sand, Hessian sacks, and other materials more suited to a beach holiday than a gallery—an enfant terrible of London’s art schools in the 1960s. Educated at St. Martin’s (when it still meant something), Flanagan quickly grew bored of minimalist orthodoxy, that oppressive, joyless cult that demanded silence and reverence. He found those demands both creatively suffocating and laughably pompous. And so, like any good provocateur, he made mischief his medium. Enter the hare.
The hare—an animal associated with fertility, madness, and the lunar cycle—became Flanagan’s totem of rebellion. He sculpted them in poses worthy of a Fellini film: boxing, leaping, playing instruments, and generally looking like they’d stolen the keys to the kingdom of art history. These were not quaint bunnies—they were Dadaist pranksters on amphetamines. And Flanagan, far from retreating into conceptualism or political didacticism, doubled down on a visual language rich with myth, movement, and above all, humor.
Hop Forward or Stand Still? The Contextual Tension
Large Leaping Hare was conceived in an era when sculpture was still wrestling with its postwar identity. In the decades following World War II, artists had all but declared the death of figuration and narrative. Sculpture became synonymous with rusting steel, welded severity, and enough abstraction to alienate a NASA engineer. Then along comes Flanagan with a hare the size of a small car, doing a gymnast’s split across a plinth that looks suspiciously like a ziggurat made from black licorice.
The 1980s art world didn’t quite know what to do with him. Was this sculpture “about” something? Was it ironic? Was it… British performance art in bronze? None of that mattered to Flanagan. He wasn’t interested in offering a TED Talk in alloy. Instead, he summoned the age-old power of storytelling and movement—except his epic wasn’t Homeric, it was haredic. The result was a figure so gleefully kinetic it practically airlifts the entire gallery out of its own navel.
The Joke’s on Gravity
What does it mean when a hare flies and never lands? Maybe it’s about transcendence. Maybe it’s about futility. Or maybe, just maybe, it’s about reminding us that the human condition isn’t as noble or tragic as we think—it’s ridiculous. Look at us: throwing up glass cathedrals to capitalism, only to put a cartoon mammal front and center as if it’s the Second Coming. And yet, there’s a kind of grace in that absurdity. Because if art doesn’t leap over its own self-importance now and then, it’s just another lump of bronze pretending to be wise.
So here’s the real question: What are you doing with your life that’s more airborne, more radiant, and more unapologetically weird than this hare?
#LeapIntoIt #FlanaganFlicksTheCanon #HighArtHare #BarryDidItBetter #GoldIsTheNewIrony #MuseumMischief #HareToBeDifferent #JumpStartTheEstablishment #ArtThatDoesn’tSitStill
#LeapIntoIt #FlanaganFlicksTheCanon #HighArtHare #BarryDidItBetter #GoldIsTheNewIrony #MuseumMischief #HareToBeDifferent #JumpStartTheEstablishment #ArtThatDoesn’tSitStill
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