The Major Periods

1962 – 1965: Early Pop Paintings

As one of the original wave of Pop artists Gerald Laing produced some of the most significant works of the British Pop movement. His paintings reproduced images of popular heroes such as starlets, film stars, drag racers, astronauts and skydivers. His 1962 portrait of Brigitte Bardot is an iconic work of the period and regularly features in major Pop retrospectives alongside Lincoln Convertible from 1964, a commemoration of the assassination of JFK.

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1965 – 1970: Utopian Abstract Sculpture

From 1965 Gerald Laing's painting evolved into abstract sculptures using the techniques and materials of car customisation - lacquering, spray-painting and chrome-plating on metal.

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1970 – 1973: Sculpture In The Landscape

A move from New York to the Highlands of Scotland in 1970 saw Gerald Laing's sculpture respond to the beauty, roughness and power of the surrounding landscape.

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1972 – 2010: Public Sculpture

Public sculptures include the the Bank Station Dragons; the Rugby Sculptures at Twickenham Stadium; the Cricketer at Lords; the Highland Clearances Memorial in Helmsdale, Sutherland and Axis Mundi in Edinburgh.

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1973 – 1980: Galina Series

Inspired by the figurative sculpture of the First World War Artillery Memorial at Hyde Park Corner, in 1973 Gerald Laing began to model in clay and cast in bronze. The Galina Series and associated sculptures were his first works from this period.

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1982 – 2007: Portrait Heads

Gerald Laing's portrait work includes heads and reliefs of Luciano Pavarotti, Andy Warhol, Paul Getty and Sam Wanamaker.

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2002 – 2005: War Paintings

The Iraq war and the publication of images of torture at Abu Ghraib prison drew Gerald Laing back to painting for the first time in over three decades. The War Paintings series sees the starlets and all-American heroes of his early paintings take on new, more sinister roles.

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2004 – 2011: New Paintings

Returning to the style and subject matter of his early pop art paintings, Gerald Laing's latest paintings feature media images of contemporary celebrities including Amy Winehouse and Kate Moss.

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Search the Catalogue

Cr370 conception jmck fas082 whitebg

Conception

Catalogue No. 394

Artist's CR 370

Autumn, 1977

Kinkell

Bronze

Edition of 10

32 x 19 x26 inches / 81 x 48 x66 cm

As far as Laing’s return to figuration is concerned, or as an evolution away from mannerism towards classicism, Conception and the American Girl are further back along the road. They include some stylizations which are almost absent in the other two. Yet at the same time they have a naturalistic, almost journalistic instantaneity in their pose, which links up to Laing’s pop art phase and is like a pop commentary on Rodin, in whose work these poses can be found and who is also a source for the sharp cut-off below the hips in both figures. As constructions these are the most interesting of the group and the angularity of the American Girl fits its spatially extended shape… Conception, however, seems to be placed between realism and mannerism.

An Exhibition of Sculpture by Gerald Laing at the Edinburgh Festival 1978, Douglas Hall, exhibition catalogue, Gladstone Court, Edinburgh, 1978

Conception dates to the later years of sculpture in clay and learned how to cast Laing’s Galina series (1973–80): a series of sculptures made of Galina Golikova, Laing’s second wife, who had model looks and sat regularly for him. Laing learned from the noted craftsman George Mancini to cast bronze, and in 1978 set up his own bronze foundry at the couple’s newly restored home, Kinkell Castle, near Inverness, Scotland. He had abandoned painting (to return briefly at the end of his life) and turned increasingly to portrait sculpture and public statues.
The Galina series was semi-abstract and strongly Brancusian in approach and technique. Furthermore, one of the impulses behind his work from the Galina series onwards had come from being deeply struck by Charles Sargent Jagger’s Royal Artillery Memorial at Hyde Park Corner in central London. The artist recalls:
‘In 1973 I had an epiphany while looking at [it]. Its powerful, narrative and humanistic content made me realise that in order to produce more significant work I required an infinite vocabulary of forms which the
limitations of sheet metal did not allow.
As a result of this experience I change my entire method of working. I modelled my sculpture in clay and learned how to cast it into bronze. Galina I was the first in this new body of work… Overall it represents a progression towards greater figuration, but all of the figures are treated formally. They are emotionally expressive and convey essential elements of the sitter with whom I had at the time an obsessive relationship. She was an excellent model with a high degree of body awareness with which she could transmit powerful emotional and sexual feeling.
This period of my work represents a search for a figurative language. The Galina Series was made concurrently with various other sculpture, such as Reclining Figure, Woman with Long Hair and Torso. They were all figurative sources which I developed towards a greater or lesser degree of formal abstraction.
Both subject matter and medium (modelling in clay, casting into bronze) were very unfashionable in the avant garde of that time and resulted in my being ostracised by my peers. I realised the risk I was taking but felt that I had no alternative. It led to a few very harsh years during which I could not get my new work accepted.’

Modern British Art, Christie's, auction catalogue, Christie's King Street, London, 2012, p.54–5