Barry Flanagan was born at Prestatyn, North Wales on 11 January 1941. His father was a set designer at the Warner Brothers’ film studios at Teddington, Middlesex. Barry was one of four children and was educated at Foxhunt Manor and Mayfield College in East Sussex. He briefly read architecture at Birmingham College of Art, before studying sculpture. Of that time, he later recalled: ‘I was a fully-fledged sculptor from the age of 17. I stepped right into it and embraced the physical world.’ He made his way at first doing odd jobs as a builder, frame-maker and even as a baker. He was quick to absorb the technical skills of each of these, calling them his ‘recipes’. He also briefly studied cello at the Guildhall School of Music and worked as a chef in a restaurant in the Fulham Road. He looked at five art schools, before settling on St Martin’s in the Charing Cross Road, because he’d profited from an evening class he took there under Anthony Caro, where the students were set exercises such as being given wire and told to make a sculpture of a ‘ZABAUUUM’. His tutor, Phillip King wrote in his final assessment that he was ‘a student who thought seriously and was capable of producing surprising, challenging work’. Of necessity, Flanagan commenced his artistic career employing humble materials, such as hessian, sand, plaster, rope, sticks and stones. He was deeply interested in words. In the 1960s, near St Martin’s, the bookshop Better Books offered hospitality to a group of concrete poets, who fascinated Flanagan. Then someone gave him a copy of the May-June 1960 issue of Evergreen Review devoted to Alfred Jarry (1873-1907) and Flanagan got hooked on ‘pataphysics’, the ‘science’ of imaginary solutions which embodied a paradox dear to his heart. He had his first solo show at the Rowan Gallery in London in 1966; it included 1 Ton Corner Piece, a hundredweight of sand poured onto the floor in a corner of the gallery, with four scoops removed from the centre. In 1967 his work comprising of four wobbly, tapering columns, a large linoleum ring and a rope, titled Four casb 2 ’67, ringl 1 ’67 and rope (gr 2sp 60) 6 ’67 (now in the Tate Gallery) were installed at the Biennale des Jeunes in Paris. They anticipated similar work by Carl André, Robert Smithson and Eva Hesse. Flanagan’s work was championed by the writers Gene Baro and Charles Harrison and the curators Eddie de Wilde at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam and Harald Szeeman in Berne. Flanagan also produced a short film A Hole in the Sea shot in 1969 on a beach near The Hague. He was in several important exhibitions that year, in Amsterdam, in Berne and in an exhibition called ‘6’ at the Hayward Gallery, curated by Michael Compton, who said he’d reckoned Flanagan would produce work that was: ‘paradoxically very cheap and yet unsaleable, a parable therefore of an ideal art.’ Flanagan taught at St Martin’s and the Central School of Art in the period 1967-71. He was a private, reserved man, and an unforced eccentric, who would wear tweeds and sandals regardless of the weather, he enjoyed his international fame, and what he regarded as his unexpected good fortune. Outside the art world, he was best known for several permanent public sculptures, such as his giant bronze Hare on Bell at the Equitable Life Tower West in Manhattan, and in London, Nine Foot Hare in the Victoria Plaza Hotel and Leaping Hare on Crescent and Bell at Broadgate. At Washington University, St Louis may be found his hare titled Thinker on a Rock. These not strictly anatomically correct bronze animals, which included elephants, cougars and horses, echoed human traits and dispositions, but never in a cute or sentimental way: they display human energy and hint at human emotions, but remain animals all the same. Flanagan represented Great Britain at the Venice Biennale in 1982. A major retrospective of his work was held at the Fundación ‘La Caixa’ in Madrid in 1993, touring to the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nantes in 1994. In his later years, Flanagan lived between Dublin and Ibiza. In 2006 the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin held a major retrospective and ten of his big bronzes paraded down O’Connell Street. Flanagan was elected ARA in 1987, RA in 1991 and a ppointed OBE that same year. In later years, he suffered from motor neurone disease. He died at Santa Eulalia, Ibiza on 31 August 2009. Flanagan gave sculptures to Jesus College, Cambridge, and a Kouros Horse to the town of Santa Eulalia.