Spatial Diagram - 2, 1988-90

Dhruva Mistry RA (b. 1957)

RA Collection: Art

On free display in Dame Jillian Sackler Sculpture Gallery

One of Mistry’s Spatial Diagram series, this particular cast of Spatial Diagram II was first exhibited at the Nigel Greenwood Gallery in 1990. Six of the small sculptures in the series were then exhibited at Yorkshire Sculpture Park in 1996 as part of the exhibition 'Dhruva Mistry: Work 1990-1996'. That exhibition also included a much larger Spatial Diagram for which the small sculptures appear to have been studies. The large Spatial Diagram has remained at Yorkshire Sculpture Park on long-term loan ever since. Mistry has also executed several commissions for large outdoor works in Britain, including his Diagram of an Object (1990) for the Hunterian Art Gallery in Glasgow, which bears a strong similarity to the Spatial Diagrams.

Originally from India, Mistry moved to England in 1981 to study at the Royal College of Art, and continued to live and work in England until his return to India in 1997. Mistry’s time in Europe encouraged the hybrid nature of his work—references to Asian deities were combined with references to European modernism, particularly Julio Gonzalez and Picasso. Andrew Wilson has identified Picasso as a particularly strong influence on the Spatial Diagrams, writing that they show ‘the extent to which Mistry’s attitude to the body acknowledges the example both of Picasso’s paintings executed in Dinard, Cannes and Paris between 1927/30 of bathers on the beach, (the so-called ‘Bone Women’), as well as of those sculptures that developed out of the painting such as Head of a Woman and Bust of a Woman which were both executed at Boisgeloup in 1932.’