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

Cr290 galinai jmck fas38 whitebg

Galina I

Catalogue No. 310

Artist's CR 290

1973

Kinkell

Bronze

Edition of 10

18.75 x 14 x10.5 inches / 48 x 36 x27 cm

After this piece Laing abandoned straight lines in favour of biomorphic forms. There followed a series of variations on the head and body of his wife Galina in which Laing was seeking to find within the body a very complex system of balancing voids and solids, in deliberate contrast to the simple theme of his often repeated pyramids. These pieces are small and do not demand enlargement, in line with Laing’s disillusionment with public sculpture. However, it is clear that this sequence of pieces is only a pause and that Laing’s real interest still lies in projecting a consciousness of the human body on to a vast scale, or of finding forms that seem to convey the possibility of this dual meaning and scale within them. For when, after the series of heads and busts, he turned to a reclining female figure, it almost immediately assumed this ambiguous, half-monumental character, and was followed by others, more abstracted and like horizontal reliefs, in which Laing is quite obviously designing on an architectural scale. These works are not in the exhibition and cannot be fully discussed, except to say that they are more evidence of the true connection between the body and architecture as twin fundamentals of sculpture, and give reason to hope that Laing has not created his last Twentieth-Century Monument.

Laing Mylius Scobie: Sculpture at Cleish, Douglas Hall, exhibition catalogue, Cleish Castle, near Kinross, 1975

The Galina Series (1973–1977) shows the route by which I returned from abstraction to the figure. The influence of the strict geometry of my abstract sculpture is evident in most of the work, and indeed is present even in my most recent and objectively arrived at images; for nothing is wasted, and we represent the sum of our experience.
Galina I is the very first step in this new direction, the moment when I abandoned fabrication and took up clay, thus allowing myself an infinite vocabulary of form. The other eight sculptures in the series were made during the next four years, variously at Kinkell, in Amagansett, Long Island, and in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where I spent a year at the University as Visiting Professor of Painting and Sculpture. These were not, of course, the only works I produced during that four year period; you will note from the serial (CR) numbers that in fact I made a further seventy images between May 1973 (Galina I) and February 1977 (Galina X), all of them exploring different methods by which the human figure might be represented.

'Notes for the Inverness Museum and Art Gallery', Gerald Laing, unpublished manuscript, 1994

In Galina I, the breast is a perfect demi-pyramid; one shoulder is organic and tender; one is geometric. The true vertical line up the centre of the work which ends in a depressed oval which refers to the soft indentation of the temple, is at the same time a conscious homage to Picasso’s Femme-Fleur.  (Picasso’s sculpture was a big influence in the early part of the Galina series).  The heads, however, beginning with Galina I, are derived from comic heroes such as the Silver Surfer (who rode the stratosphere looking down and murmuring to himself, ‘Alas what fools these mortals be’). And these comic images have, of course, roots in Japanese art and applied art, and probably run much deeper than that into the elemental human psyche.

'Notes for an Autobiography', Gerald Laing, unpublished manuscript, 2011