The Easel

Elisabeth Frink’s Human Bestiary

Anxieties about war didn’t show in Frink’s daily life but sure did in her art. Her 1960’s “goggle head” forms are noble but also sinister. The later Riace figures suggest “a warrior as the aggressor and a brutalized victim”. Immune to the emergence of abstract art around her, these natural forms were the perfect vehicle to express the “coexistence of empathy and dread in [her] moral imagination.”